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.