i have to go home

i'll make the cement tomorrow.

it's been a long week.

also

last night i dreamed that i was traveling cross country with my brother, who was (a not-quite-as-old) Ted Danson. He was ridiculously drunk all the time however, and required constant supervision. We stopped at a gas station and i turned my back for one second, and already he jumped into the driver's seat of some other motorist's Plymouth Prowler. He revved the wheels and the thing jumped forward as it was gassing up at the pump, and the front wheelguards got sliiiightly scratched - the owner became very angry with uus and demanded that I pay him a few thousand dollars, or he'd have my brother arrested or sued..

ch8ng3?

may sept. feb july. no different.

yahooo search highlights "spiderman 4 -national treasure - dustin diamond - et cetera"

VACUOUS.

i just had a glimmer.. i have complained about the internet before. my job plants me in front of it daily. i am wired 24/7. i am tired of it, but hopelessly locked in till my body expires.

sigh. i want to unplug. i feel sad lately, in no small part due to the digitalization of my day-to-day life. i just had a one-moment fantasy of a life where i never get online, don't even look at or interface with a computer. obviously my chosen line of work will not jive with such a philosophy. Ah well, it would be happy. Maybe this is why people join the peace corps (don't worry)

yeah i would miss it. i have been spoiled.

all that is in the gameplan of my life, what has been drilled into my psyche by life/love/relationship expectations/society/competitiveness of industry.. "work work work, innovate, earn, save up, progress, adhere to the standard." It's no wonder I had become a scenester the past couple of years in rebellion to that mentality, eh?

(i think i need a vacation!) Maybe next year. Maybe in a few weeks I will go to the beach. spend a few days without interacting with anyone or looking at a screen of any sort.. just dig my toes into the sand, listen to the waves crash, munch on a hot dog with coleslaw and onions, and give not a shit about what time of day it is.

a very short blog - TUES MAY 22

yesterday fired up some more BBQ (i actually got to eat some this time). big parties are cool but sometimes it's just as good to chill in the backyard with just a couple of buddies, a couple of beers and a couple of cheeseburgers. i think i see a lot of that going on this summer.

it's super-late and i am pretty sleepy. 1am and i am just leaving the office right now. i have been making decent work all day though (and got into my rhythm as the day wore on). I miss the old days when i would work late and there'd bye my brothers beside me, toiling away "for the love of the game..." Yup I do miss those days. Sansui with Ted, Skillz, Andy. I found some pictures and they brought me back, what can I say.

Soon enough, eh...

no more cold crotchless undies for you!!

damn is it time to send out my rent check again, already?? damn.. damn damn...

wel, i suppose i had better get on with writing my "semi-weekly blog" out of the way, or whatever. blogging is not really too fun/therapeautic for me anymore, too many people read it (too many people means any more people other than just me), but i guess that is the point.. to keep me from getting too full of myself or something (yeah, isn't that possible?)

Switched my keyboard at home again to the new wireless one may got for me, which means that i am liable to type even more horribly than usual, at least until my fingers re-adjust to this thing. keep it in mind.

exhausted, such a tiring weekend. i actually passed out at my desk (home desk) about an hour ago, i guess.. the phone rang and scared the beejeezus out of me and woke me from my slumber, i screamed and struggled to get up (the chair had pushed all the way up to the desk ad squished me in the space between them). it was a mathematical quandary, yet i loosened myself. So there's the weekend... friday night motored back to LA, stopped in Koreatown to pick up lots of short ribs. Took may out for a drink and then we caught a cab home and passed out. Next day, woke up and ran all around town getting ready for the BBQ, getting keg/buying more food/cleaning apartment/etc. The whole day whizzed and before you know it the thing was full-bore, to all who came out to pay their regards. Always fun to hang out with my friends. We ate lots of meat, nothing got burned, the keg got drained (and the rest of the booze likewise). Tons of food left over but what're ya gonna do, it will be gone in a few days i am sure anyway.

Today got up and ran out w some friends for breakfast, the sun cae out and makde me happy. Then lounged a bit, back home to lounge a but and throw back a couple of beers and actually relax for a couple of hours (!!!!), a couple friends came over and we fired up some of the leftovers. And so it goes. They tried to get me to go out dancing, sooo glad i didn't go (i have no more energy!) and i have been just slowly fading into unconsciousness all evening (until the phonecall). In that vein, R.I.P. to May's little turtle, he is in the giant terrarium in the sky now.. sniff, sniff..

things are alright, as usual.. this keyboard isn't very responsive and so i might have to send it to the giant Dumpster in the sky as well (or across the street) unfortunately. I hate typing words while looking elsewhere, only to discover that they've not made it to the screen.

a very long and busy week ahead of me with work, i still want to start my "industry blog," hopefully i will get to launch that soon. i have a lot of thoughts in my head, work-related, that deserve being committed to the page.

preservatives for the nacho-less

oh okay and one more thing

WHO THE HELL IS READING MY BLOGGGGGGG???? WHO DAMN IT??? WHO WHO WHO?

I updated the damned thing 15 f-ing minutes ago. that's all well and good. 7 people have read my blog since i updated it? on sunday evening? is this for real? in FIFTEEN MINUTES?

okay now i want some goddamned answers. is there some weird bug in the myspace blog viewer tally program? is there some spider bot that constantly keeps tabs on all of the pages all over the vastness of the entire internet, and whenever any page ANYWHERE has some kind of text update then it will ping it and send a "viewed" -- and in this case, this means there's like 10 of these?

or do i have an army of obsessive compulsive followers, keeping up-to-date on the day-to-day nothing that is my non-life? Is it really so riveting to read about how many sodas I drank yesterday, ro what the temperature in la habra was, or what neo-geo game I wish I had bought when i was 16, or that i was fantasizing about some ponytailed overweight white trash gas-station attendent in des moines who made eye contact with me for 4 awkward seconds? is all of this really the fuel for someone's livelihood? please, don't get me wrong, i appreciate your worship, but take my advice, if my blog page is so fascinating to you that you have examined my natural rhythms and developed a sixth sense about when I would irregularly update this thing DOWN TO THE HALF-HOUR, then pleeeaaase find some much more constructive and useful way to spend your mind and your hours than pecking about with my middling bullshit.

Either that, or i am some clueless, sexy genius living in my own time and completely unaware of it altogether. Awash in my own depleted self-esteem, i plod endlessly on through the lonely, empty days of my dark colorless imagined bleak reality while in fact throngs of hot 18-to-37-year old cybervixens hang on every word i type, in between WOWing and applying mascara and making love to themselves in the mirror, and fantasize about me quietly as i spank their pale chunky behindeds in their supercharged virile young nightmarish sexual fantasies.

Either that, or the government is keeping a keen on on me and waiting for an exploitative moment. George Orwell might be right.

BTW two more views since I typed this. Send naked pics to ralp99@hotmail.com

happy mother's day xbox 360 custom faceplate secret agent royal jew

another day in the office.
the A/C isn't working so i am sweaty.
car accident on the 5 so i sat in traffic.
bought metal gear solid 3 for $7 at fry's. maybe i need to play the first two however.
drinking cocacola zero. low in calories, high in sodium.. my blood pressure could use the boost.

my friends all went out partying last night, i stayed in and saved @ $80. we had korean BBQ and i did my laundry anyway.

my fingernails are getting quite long, i keep rubbing my lip and hurting my face. And the keyboard is hard to type on.

my girlfriend reallllly got on my nerves this weekend, but then she wears that dumb cute little skirt to go running and makes me forget why i was pissed at her.. damn it.

I just watched two people playing "The Punisher" (an old 1990s video game, not an egregious medieval sex act) and made a nerdy comment to them about how they could upload more Mame games to their Xbox via FTP. Then I felt ashamed and walked on.

I saw pictures of myself from Skillz & Mong's wedding last September. My hairdo was very messy and sloppy. Like a gross bedhead. I looked like I was having a good time though.

Yesterday I ate an enormous pickle. Hopefully I will not party this week.

fat towels

sattt may twelve, sattt may twelve.

3:30pm, i am sitting in the office on a saturday. trying to pick roast beef out from between my two front teeth, with my tongue. i am not finding much success.

waiting for the sync program to finish file updating so i can open my scene and work on it some more. it usually blasts through in ten minutes or so.. right now it's getting on 1 hr. Dammit. Waste my time.

Things are alright. I had an okay evening last night but woke up in a very lousy mood. It's not much better right now.. i feel like i am fighting with so many things in my life right now. Job, relationship, money. Yeah, everyone else can really say the exact same things, can't they. In fact when one of those drops out, then things get perturbed for real, it seems.

We saw the new zombie movie last night, it was fun! It was sort of a seat-of-the-pants plan to go and check it out, i like things like that. got some food, caught the film, had a couple of drinks (nuthin crazy). the evening was chilly but i decided to walk to mile-or-so home, and it felt really relaxing. i think i will always have a soft spot for the cool nights, if every night was that way i honestly would not mind.

walking home chilled me out a bit, i think i just don't do simple stuff like that enough anymore. as i get older, i am definitely becoming more of a desk-sitter.. not out of laziness, just out of necessity. our society DEMANDS it! Well, i have complained about that countless times so i can leave it on the shelf for the moment.

It was hot this week, like "holy crap oh my god" -hot. I think it was getting on 100, unseasonably warm! We had a big fire in griffith park near my apartment, i could see the glowing smoke from my back lot. Fortunately they contained it, quickly, before any major expensive damage could occur. I see a lot of fires coming up this season - we had almost zero precipitation during the winter, which is usually the rain season - everything is "bone dry" as they say. Maybe California will burn up as it slips into the Pacific Ocean.

I remember when I was in middle school i saw a movie called "bill and ted's excellent adventure," starring a couple of doofus stoners from southern california. They had that shitty surfer accent and way of speaking that just seemed too cartoony to be real. Fast forward a couple of decades and i still regularly see people who talk like IDIOTS in my day to day life. I know, I am not better, I cuss like a drunken sailor (hey, it's a way to be) and it makes me sound pretty stupid at times - i shouldn't throw stones. Anyway it just amazes me when i hear relatively smart people with retarded dialects. It actually surprises me sometimes. While i am on a roll with complaining about how people talk, my new pet peeve is the general public's cutesy nicknames for the internet.. people like to say shit like "i heard of it on the interwebs, the internets, the intertubes.." etc etc. Gah! it pisses me off! I guess just cause it's one of those "trendy smart-alecky" things that people like to say to come off like they are snarky and well-to-do, "ohh i am cool, i make fun of the internet." You damned bozo, you have a fucking myspace page like everyone else. When were nerds allowed to make fun of nerds (in a demeaning way?) Okay, now I am being snarky too. I can't help it though. I dislike.

I had to get it off my chest, anyway.

Anyway, my file update completed at last. I have to listen to 8bit music on my headphones now. Rock on, BlasterMaster.

boredwitcha

alright. today was a really hot one. i heard it was creeping on close to 100 degees in Orange County today.. I believe that... the ride home tonight in my car was extremely stuffy, even at 9 in the evening, enough to make me feel very disgusting. i came home, threw all the windows open upstairs in the bedroom, then back downstairs to chill out a little and crank the AC for the first time in many, many months.

sigh,. and i realized that there's no water in the fridge. i don't really feel like havin' a beer either.

come to think of it. i have not had a drink in a little over a week now. okay i had a single beer saturday night, but y'know. seriously, once in awhile i will go on a sobriety binge, to the tune of a few weeks/a month, for whatever reason. it can be a harsh reality check (my soul needs the escapism), but when i get my feet wet with it then it becomes hard to want to go the other direction. yeah, my personality has been split in half for a few years now.. each of us can't really stand the other, but we know the reason that the other has to be there (don't you love the talk of the schizophrenic?)

Actually my "crazy self" has been retired for a long time now, or at least he is deep in hibernation. If anything, his mellowed-out distant cousin is all that gets expressed when I am letting loose. I think it's symptomatic of age, and exhaustion. Do I sound defeated yet? I guess my mood is pretty somber, beaten-down lately. That's no surprise, there's only so many times you can bounce back with full-on fervor before you start to flag a little. I am definitely feeling winded from the events of the past couple of years, not so much physically tired as mentally and emotionally wrung out..! Okay, I over-dramaticize (as usual) and anybody could call me out with the usual accusations ("Ron, you think too much!") But well, what else is new. I DO think too much.. that's who I am, and how it'll always be, more and more. I couldn't do what I do the way I do it, if i wasn't over-analytic (to a fault) It's okay, I have met enough people who function in the same way.

Hey, I am hitting my midlife crisis! What the hell, aren't I supposed to be about 15 years too early for this crap? I have this nagging feeling, that a lot of the people I am talking to lately are easily about 10 years my junior, and they can't relate to a lot of the stupid stuff that is buzzing around in the back of my head. It's really bizarre. Whenever I go out, most of the girls at the clubs I'll be at were probably born at least in the mid-80s. At least! That's no big deal, but the truth is I never really attached much significance to this stuff until the last year or so. When I turned thirty I kind of wrote it off as "just another number" but now it's already been a couple of years. Two years is nothing but 2 more will fly by just as easily. Then a couple more. Pretty soon I will have to start thinking about behaving like an adult... --gulp--

I am feeling a bit alienated from the popular culture lately. I can't think of hardly a SINGLE album that I want to buy. Maybe, seriously, just one, and even then I could give or take. I used to be such a music hound. I heard a commercial on the radio "Tonight is the last episode of King of Queens" hey I have never even SEEN the show! And then, there's my industry. Most people I associate with have serious honest-to-goodness nostalgia for videogames that got released long after I stopped playing them! Yeah. I am really getting left behind.

I need a kick in the ass with the "media consumption," as they say. Most of my contemporaries like to buy and collect things.. I collect a little crap here and there, nothing heavy duty beyond the occasional passing fancy. Anyone who reads this with any regularity knows my usual credo "I'd rather create stuff than just consume it," but these days when I am throwing myself into a new creative, uh... whirlwind, I can't really completely count on my work to help me express my serious underlying need for that cathartic release.

I have been in a bad mood, not terrible but just adjusting. My new job is making me appreciate the old one (and the old one pissed me off). I think it's more of the same, I am just getting tired of jumping from one ship to the next, one life to the next - no surprise there. A new cast of characters, once again. Of course, after all these years, I kind of have developed these templates in my head for the basic types of people I'll work with. It's a little strange, I can almost effortlessly break down most of them into stereotypes at this point, it's been so many revolutions. I guess I am on someone else's template as well then, yeah? No one is really special, are they...

I am still planning on starting a game industry blog. I feel like it is kind of vital for me, again not just to vent but rather to stir up a bit more of my own presence in the industry. I want to launch into it immediately but there's a few things holding me back, this stuff can be sort of delicate for a bunch of reasons. Lately I find myself spending several hours each week listening to industry-related podcasts, and for a moment I considered possibly even going that route. Sigh. that's a weirder though. Blogging is one thing, but literally having a "regular voice" is a whole other matter. At this point it is easy as hell to create such a thing, even market it, and with my particular perspective I wouldn't have much trouble stirring up some attention with one. The one's I have heard, which are popular enough, are already put out by relative sideliners (I said relative, not to take away from the people that actually go through all the regular trouble of doing those things).. but I do know if I hopped on that bandwagon and kept at it with some regularity and fervor, it would put me on the fast track to where I'd like to be (out of gruntsville and in charge of some larger business). Maybe I will dabble in it, maybe I will throw myself at it's mercy.. it's such a strange time now, with that sort of thing - this "new media," and everyone can have their fifteen minutes of fame.

For those that don't know, if there is anyone who reads this thing and doesn't know what a podcast is, here's a super-brief rundown.. basically it's a regularly-produced episodic program on whatever topic you can imagine, in the style of a radio show. usually extremely low-budget, it'll consist of about 4 or 5 guys yakking over their PC microphones to each other and recording a sound file, which will then be distributed over itunes or the web or whatever to be played back on an ipod (hence the name) or, just winamp or whatever. It's a new thing and there's a bajillion of them out there already, but for what I do, there's only a tiny handful of pro-level ones. And from what I can tell, there's not really more than a couple of developers who actually produce such things with any regularity, and certainly not on the micro level of a game artist or designer. Yeah, Insomniac studios has their usual thing, Hideo Kojima's got something in that fashion (last I checked it was unlistenable, but either it's got better by now or they've since scrapped it) - I am sure there's gotta be a couple more out there, somewhere. Anyway - I don't wanna ramble on too much about this stuff, it's exactly the reason that I wanted to start a second industry-related blog. Maybe I will launch a site right NOW (man, it's so weird that one can do that in the blink of an eye)

Myspace is no longer of much interest to me (maybe if i was single, ha) and in fact I don't find myself scouring the web for much frivolity these days.. maybe cause i have started working and my mind's on that stuff, or maybe it's just a crazy enough time with everything else going on that it's hard to get bored enough. Maybe the novelty's worn off, and last but not least maybe I'm too self-centered and would rather just work or write something halfway interesting. I do spend a lot of time reading up on what's going on over at the forums though, but that seems to be about it.

My friend Matt made a short film, it is in the wrapping-up stage (when is it gonna get "put out into the world." man?) I decided to throw him a bone and contributed a little time to make a lo-tech website for the project (that's about as far as my web-prowess extends anyway), check it out... http://www.bornhye.com/ .. at the very least you can see a preview for the actual film. I have mentioned it before in this journal, matt and scott did an excellent job putting this film together and I hope they can get it out there while the gettin's good!!

1am. time for some shut-eye.

spiral stairs

new contact lenses (several months overdue), but the right eye is kind of smeary.

listening to loveline with ron jeremy.. such a nebbish. i did meet that guy, once..

So i lived in thai town for a few years, which might as well be named Little Armenia (in fact, it may well be for all i know)... point is I have developed a taste for the Armenian food. Frequent readers of this blog (all four of you) will know of my love for Zankou chicken -- since starting this new job, i have been sad to find that my new place of employment isn't surrounded by much in the way of "interesting character food," and I don't mean of the sort which repeats on you. We got subway, jack inthe box, and weinershnitzel, sigh. Anyway I miss my schwaerma! I did a little yahoo searching and found some local armo place, the web says it's "one of the best Aremian restaurants in Orange County, if not the entire country!" Well hell, I had to check this out. it's like 5 miles away, i hopped in my car and flew over there.

Okay, they charged me $13 for a roast beef pita sandwich with some french fries. Dude, $13? I know I am Jewish, but c'mon. Zankou + Tarzana Armenian Deli will give you 3X the amount of food for that price. Anyway I already made it that far, so I forked over the cash and read the local rag while they prepared my sandwich. Might I add the restaurant was HUGE. It was full of geriatric folks and looked like a freakin' fancy well-to-do Vegas Resort uppity eatery. So at this point my expectations were getting mixed. I got back to my office, grabbed a soda and sat down at my desk. The fries were cold, soggy and limp, and then I bit into the pita and oh my GOD, i started to tear up!! not with joy, but with holy shit spicy goddamn mustard is in this sandwich! Mouthfuls of it. Mind you I enjoy spicy food, but this was retarded - the sandwich, it caused me physical discomfort to eat it. But I had already made it all the way back to the office and I had such a light non-dinner the previous evening, I eschewed the morning's bagels.. i paid 13 goddamned dollars for this !@)*!@% miserable excuse for a sandwich. I soldiered through the poisonous mustardy lettuce layer as my nasal passages blossomed and i wept, and i made it to the roast beef layer, which was as unfantastic as the rest of the meal was, erhm, pungent. Anyway I polished the thing off and swore never to return to this godforsaken eating establishment. The search continues.

I'm having a BBQ in a few weeks and I would like to be a good host and support some half-decent videogame-playing. I have a huge arcade joystick for my PC and I'd like to hook it up to my xbox (no one likes playing party games huddled awkwardly around a computer screen). I ordered an adaptor to plug my joystick into the xbox, like most things in my life it's DIY and will require some nifty finagling to get the things working properly - my inner mechanic thrills at the challenge, so long as it's not a big expensive waste of money. Sigh, I really should learn some automotive shit.. anyway I have yet to get my xbox modded anyway (hopefully soon!) so until such a time, I won't know if Tab A fits into Slot B.

Also I have been looking into buying a projector. My girlfriend's been gung-ho for me to shell out for a big screen LCD for the living room, but those things are prohibitively expensive and I am pretty happy with my 36" CRT (i know, ron who hates materialist things is switching gears into yuppie mode). The point is - it's nice to have a fancy crazy screen, but for the amount of TV/vids i watch, I am more than all set with the setup I have working. Though, I saw my friend's projector recently and it really felt like being at a damned movie theater! And it's kind of unique and unusual, which I like. So, I have been looking a bit for the heck of it and i think I found a good deal <$500. That's a great price, if the product is good. I gotta do a little more research - if it's getting over that, then I can happily not give two shits. But yeah, BBQ with Guitar Hero on Projector Screen would be pretty rockin' I have to say. We will see...

Ironically, i haven't ever played that game, unlike everyone else in the world. What? Ron didn't play a video game? Hey, if the screen moves, I don't wanna touch it, alright?

So the days are flying by at work. I mean they go by FASSSSST. It's a little shitty actually, not that I don't like to go home and do other stuff besides work, it's just that I certainly do want to be able to get my stuff done in the appropriate time. I don't feel like I am dragging my heels, but i do feel like I'll start getting into my rhythm and then --poof-- it's time to pack it in and go home already. I guess I can just stick around and put in some extra hours for the hell of it, for the time being..