E3 Fever (the geekiest i have ever shown myself to be)

Swept Up By: tech-festival mood of the ultramodern age
Sweeping Up: ultramodern gadget packaging. it's everywhere.

woo boy, i have really enjoyed soaking up the feeling of carnival this week from the E3 buzz. my sense gamery-ness has been really inflated over the last few months (thanks to trusty old PSP) and i've been a lot more interested in the games press, the industry and the hype surrounding some of the franchises featured at E3. so i've been well-primed for it all.

for those not in the know, E3 is a veritable adult playground of a games press-convention-event-thingy. but then, if you don't know what E3 is, this whole post will probably be pretty boring and you can skim the metaphorical bullet-points safe in the knowledge that you haven't missed much, really.

earlier in the week, i scoured the net for some podcasts to grab on my PSP (trusty, old) and came up with surprisingly little (lifeinsidethebox.com aside, thanks twitter!) - i'm a bit hitty-missy with games sites. see, i hit escapistmagazine.com for zero punctuation and often stick around to read their editorials¹, but i don't check any of the major sites (ign, gamespot) regularly enough to know about their podcasts. so i was pretty disappointed really, as i wanted a plethora and i barely got a pleth. but the lifeinsidethebox.com folks seem cool - they snabbled me on twitter when i appealed to the higher collective for podcast leads and they seem to be sort of... internet-based gonzo game journalists. which is a phrase that i think i'll hide away and cherish.

the microsoft conference hit GMT at 5.25pm although i can't say for sure if it did, as the technical difficulties at xbox.com prevented me from seeing it until 5:45pm. durr, microsoft seems to say. what dis? thank god i missed paul mccartney though. ugh.

i'm not going to great-detail it about the conferences, as it's old hat, yesterdays news, and better writers than me are detailing it; i just want to sketch out my impressions of My Very First E3... for, you know, posterity.

Microsoft Conference
technical difficulties snickersomely aside, i must admit even my general british hostility at showy american enthusiasm wore off with some of the titles mentioned and also that nice girl who was in buffy really helped with this too. and remember, sony hadn't shown us their magic dildo at this point, so i must admit i goggled - positively goggled - at project natal and the level of depth with which it seems to implement nintendo's undignified stumblings in motion control. note also the touch of pride at peter molyneux in this mix, too, folks. i can't help it, he's a bit of a hero of mine.

Nintendo Conference
multiplayer mario and a heartbeat sensor thingy. no. no, no, no.
i did, however, like the forced chumminess on-stage of the really big guy who looks like he sells things for a living with the really skinny guy that looked like he codes in a darkened room for a living. and i enjoyed seeing the real-life incarnation of the simpsons' Lindsay Naegle being all feisty businesswoman. moderately interested in golden sun DS. as a previous owner of a GBA, 2xDS, a gamecube and an N64, i feel i have the right to say "nintendo should branch out a little, game-wise". i used to love nintendo's imagination, but now they seem to just add numbers to old games².

Sony Conference
that jack tretton lad. he's a card, eh? self-referential shtick. much chortling. much waggling of eyebrows. good stuff. good stuff. tech-wise, i was mightily excited for a umd-less psp. until i considered the logistics. the taking-away of my buying games in-store. the being forced to use my own bandwidth to download content. keeping my droves of data on an increasingly-filled wodge of memory³. but then he said they weren't replacing the proper psp, so i didn't feel pressured any more, and could just revel in a new gizmo. i still don't like the slidey top overbalance, but i think it would be perfect from someone such as my mother, who really should stop stealing my psp and get her own. so in four years time, when it's affordable, that's what she's getting for christmas. either that or a ps2, which i felt vaguely compelled to buy after all that spiel. by this point, i was gimmicked off and yet another motion control wasn't going to find it easy to grab my attention, especially as i was devoting a lot of my energy to eating a sausage roll at the time, but the PS3 hardware looks fucking awesome. if a little baby-steps, baby-steps.

those were my vague impressions of all these streaming webcasts that occupied my teatimes all this week.

INTERESTED IN:

• free racing games on the xbox. i'm impressed microsoft could wrestle with the notion of free
• twitter on xblive - sad but true
• project natal & the ps3's magic dildo - not for me personally(!), but for such a seamless implementation of console hardware/software engineering.
• alan wake - looks a bit like "John Carpenter's The Fog - The Game!" and i'll probably be too scared to play it.
• splinter cell - the new demo made me interested in the franchise. i'm pretty gullible
• metal gear solid rising puns. not the game, just the puns.
• hideo kojima - who looks like a nice young man in need of a square meal
• milo demo - yes, interesting, but with a multitude of ethical considerations (see the film AI)
• uncharted female sidekick - a goldeneye natalya for this new generation. i hope you can shoot her in the bum.
• little big planet on the psp - squee!
• mass effect 2 - thank god i'm not dead. i had seriously invested in this character
• assassin's creed 2. i hope i bond with this new chappie as much as i did with Altair. i know they're the same person, but i'm fickle.
• assassin's creed on the PSP woooooooooo - i know, i know. old news. but still
• soul calibur psp
• tekken on the xbox. ouch, sony. ouch.
• the thing with the dragon
• star wars mmorpg - i'm even considering getting a gold xblive account. yes, i'm going to part with my freaking cash. again. for more games stuff

NOT INTERESTED IN:

• halo
• the beatles (i'm a musician, i can say this, and no, no i won't back down, no.)
• forza. bleh. such hype, for this?
• more mario sequels.
• lilac
• hannah montana
• no price cuts for wii. bastards.

WORRIED ABOUT:

• games industry secretly conspiring against gamers with motion control to make us all look like twats.

so that's it. my first E3 practically over, although i can't wait to dig into all the post-e3 reports and important bits that i've missed while work got in the way - podcasts in the mornings, webcasts in the evenings.

boy this took a lot of writing-up. i didn't realise i'd paid so much attention. well, i'm off to bugger my firmware on my psp. games sure are hard work. (note to self - too trite? this is extremely important i feel)


---

¹ _{actually, i find the escapist articles often hook me in with their titles but let me down when it comes to their content - i've been reading games journalism since the c64 age and we're still using cliches like "a [blank] all it's own" and "it's own particular brand of [blank]" - see harold bloom's comments on cliches of the "stretched his legs" variety if you want to pinpoint what i'm trying to say, but haven't the language to express it.}

² _{i'm still going to buy a wii though. and eventually sell it, like alllll the rest of my nintendo consoles. but i'll probably just end up playing gamecube games on it.}

³ _{i love the solid feel of umds, i just can't help it - having a bunch of them clatter around my desk, i feel so - so - dystopian futurey, so kathryn bigelow. (or i just relive the glory days of minidiscs. i miss minidiscs. sigh.)}

yesterday i noticed a fluffy dandelion seed on my jeans.

i felt used.

The Scratch (or "Humans Optional")

Listening To: the loudest laptop fan in the world.

the killer of all working fortnights has been stopping me from blogging recently. i've found the time to tweet of course, but had i let myself get involved in a more lengthy creative-writing exercise, i may have wandered into extreme anti-humanist areas, tangent-wise.

the cause: my beloved BigPoot* has been virused and malwared and everything-elsewared. so i've fallen into this strange cycle of mistrust with it. i won't let it online. i won't even let it on the network. which has of course led to quite hard working conditions for this net developer... in the first week of this hellish crisis, what time wasn't idled away in front of Malware Bytes running in safe mode was spent feverishly trying to keep my non-nicotined cool and refraining from ramming the spare usb wireless dongle up my Compaq laptop's arse. yes, in a house full of theoretical computers, the actual tally ran as follows, midweek:

1 x BigPoot - wheezing, looking peaky and moaning softly to itself whilst mumbling under its breath/rocking side to side

1 x HP/Compaq Presario F500 with a tendency to giggle at nothing and no working internal wireless card thanks to a hardware failure outside of warranty. this could be fixed if only the bloody thing had a PCI express card slot, but Compaq didn't think this would be needed in a laptop. and the touchpad gives me RSI, too. who knew?

1 x nifty netbook, plucky in attitude with a fine and dandy wireless connection and super-duper battery life, but running linux-linpus lite on a tiny screen and keyboard, so not very pleasing development environment

1 x usb dongle (more of a tease than an actual working peripheral)

so last week i kinda snapped a little and splurged (awful word) on a newold Sony Vaio. it's a cutie S5M/S from a few years ago, and although it has a terrible habit of running exquisitely hot, it's welcomed into the fold like a stray bantam under a broody hen's - er - well, whatever it is that bantams nestle under for warmth, i guess.

in other news... there's been no other news. i've been hiding in my Hobbit Hole for a good few weeks and i must say, i'm starting to enjoy my own company a lot more than seeing people who aren't in my head at the moment. yes, i think i can finally chalk myself up as an official recluse. give me my wireless network, my guitar, my dog and (preferably flat) ground to walk him on, and i am a happy woman.

Trying To Concentrate On: technology trends, learning the bamboo flute, exercise and my new moleskine
Trying To Ignore: the socialite screaming to be let out in my psyche
Baffling: Google's Chrome shipping without spelling-dictionary knowledge of the word "blogging".

Twitter Poems

to celebrate my 1,000th tweet just now, why not feast on some lovely twitter magnet poems what i wrote:

Open Eye
after life & desire /
who are we most spun for? /
i, she - wear, devour. /
spat out like our home.

Gleam
slow down, boy. /
we satisfied all their bestial dances /
we - naked, /
as if from a ferocious, quiet blaze.

Marble
the ocean will say /
the godflower is most like you. /
i do gaze, but soft breeze-clouds /
are blind from above.

please excuse the whole "spat out like our home" debacle, as twittermagnet really wasn't giving me anything more fruity. i've been musing on these as i'm a little bit proud of them, and thinking to myself, how much of these words are my own? but the poetry of it sounds like me, so clearly i'm irrepressible. or maybe i just happen to think like twittermagnets.

in further celebration of mentioned twitter landmark, i shall now drink this mug of tea, which i feel i have been tweeting about often and consistently for many months now. omnom.

Koyal (Songbird)

Listening To: the muggy night setting in behind me, instead of in front of me.

it's funny how, when things change, it always seems to happen so suddenly. technically, everything is changing all the time but i guess you have to really sit still to notice it.

but when you strive for change against the grain, don't you notice every single step? for me recently it's been changing the bedroom (let's be honest, it's more of a nest, really) layout around. but the hassle of changing this most supreme space has been mirrored in the equally tasking changing-the-rest-of-my-life. i told myself i wouldn't be ruled by the seasons this year, but it's hard not to feel motivated by spring...

the main bedroomchangeexperience motivation was reducing the #anguaji_mouse terror threat. it's strange, for all the noise he made, i only found a couple of signs of habitation. a chewed shoe here, a filled-out crossword puzzle there, the butt of a tiny mouse-sized cigarette stubbed out under the wardrobe... the natural world is a truly amazing place.

so no more #anguaji_mouse saga. truly, i think i should Saga it. in runes, and throat-chanting.

thanks to new layout, my exercise bike gets a good look-in once again. i think possibly i may be the only person in the world to exercise to The Lord Of The Rings audio book. very theraputic, it's the only thing that can replace Radio 4's the News Quiz (with the fantastico Sandi Toksvig) to cycle to. even when i work out, i Geek. it's in the blood.

actually, this audio book has been floating around my life for months and months now, mostly because i either work-out to it in short bursts, or listen to it in bed (i.e. while falling asleep). lately, i've been worrying about it finishing and what would i replace it with, in a macrocosm of human fear-of-death psychology, but a more pressing problem has manifested itself. we're up to the Two Towers and the narrator's Gollum sounds a lot like Zippy from Rainbow. frankly, i've had to skip the entire 4th book so the whole affair can wrap up with some dignity, but i'm dreading the final scenes in mount doom.

the rest of my time has been spent significantly avoiding my one-photo-a-day project, venn diagrams shaped like willies (and later - much, much worse), PSPs and the custom firmwares thereof, Cosina AF35s, retro gaming on the go, getting fux0red on eBay (twice) and drawing on whiteboards, blackboards and various other boards.

i currently have no plans to end this blog entry with a trite conclusion.

Watching: i'll tell you what i'm not watching. The Watchmen. i just finished the comic, and their custodes can custodiet themselves, thank you so very much.
Playing: at being the UberGeek, and winning.
Excited About: "hacker spaces". killer concept.
Worried About: personal ratio of musician-to-geek falling, entering into uncool territory. should gig soon and bring everything back to normal again.

[edit: friendNick just pointed out that George could be Legolas*, and we could spin an entire Rainbow-meets-? series out of this genre-melding. nice work, friendNick!]

* George would obviously be Frodo, though, Bungle would be Boromoir and Fred would have to be Aragorn. Rod and Jane? Faramir and Eowyn. obviously.

Blog As You Go

Listening To: the TV in Coco V's, Newcastle.

you know, if you were in Coco V's, Newcastle, UK right now, you could watch me blog this. luckily, my readership is probably still on its way home from work, so i'm immune to blog-stalkers. although it does raise one of the many concerns about the rise of GPS-related information services.

anyway. nouveau geek-culture thought for today: can everything be expressed in terms of Version Control Numbering? like, this sentence brings this blog entry to v0.65b - Beta, because i may change this entry in the future, but intend to make it live to the public whilst acknowledging that it may contain flaws.

my hair: bethHair v3.0(b?).

hm. i think possibly working out what constitutes a full version change would take too much time and effort to implement such a grand philosophy, though technically it is possible.

did sartre feel this way when he was defining the theory of archetypes?

Abusing: the HSPDA network to look at lolCats on the go. how times have changed.

Cycling Trivialities

Listening To: #anguaji_mouse rustle his newspaper at me irritably whilst waiting for me to finish on the computer.

i haven't updated for a while. this is due to many factors, the least of which was losing faith in a previously unheard-of quantity of humanity. but that's not important. the greatest things keeping me from detailing the minutae of my monochrome postmodern life were:

1) Sky+ installation
2) #anguaji_mouse fixation

re: bullet point 1 - this is the best thing to happen to the household since... well, since ever. unfortunately, we've never had sky tv at all while the rest of the world has long-since grown weary of its repetitive programming. this has meant i've had to catch up on 20 years of missed broadcasting. it's led to rediscovering M*A*S*H. bliss.

re: bullet point 2 - it all started out with a random nibbling sound. it escalated to paper rustling. i have a mouse somewhere in my teeny (but immensely cluttered) bedroom. i sleep on the floor. this is an awful situation, especially when you consider that i'm the biggest animal softie in the world, and can't bear to catch a mouse in a snap-trap, but the little bugger keeps avoiding the live trap, and persists in taking part in all-night rustling sessions with #landing_mouse.

it's gone beyond fixation, though. i'm trying to plug #anguaji_mouse as the next chuck norris. it could happen. and it could happen to #anguaji_mouse.

#anguaji_mouse doesn't read books. he just stares them down until they give him the information he needs.