\o/

/A drinker and a fiend

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:52:13 -0500

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/Gato gato gato

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:53:07 -0500

Chrono Trigger Resurrection - Remake Project

In the wake of the veritable internet shitstorm that occured when a "leaked' Weekly Famitsu scan and an official-looking countdown site hinted at a Chrono Trigger DS game, Nathan intoduced me to Chrono Trigger: Resurrection, a fan-made, 3D remake, of sorts. It was never intended to be a fully-fledged game, just ten individual scenes strung together. Square Enix shut it down a few years ago, but I'd never heard of the project before last night.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the project -- it's technically impressive, with production values far higher than I what I imagined a few dudes with no budget would be able to pull off, even if there aren't any textures. However, I'm not sure if I can wrap my mind around the character models or art design, apparently inspired by the Toriyama-designed anime cutscenes from the Final Fantasy Chronicles PSOne collection. Something about it seems off, like Chrono is too bulky and beefy.

That being said, I'm anxious to see how Square will "enhance" CT DS. Don't get me wrong, I love Final Fantasy III DS, another classic remake, but the superdeformed characters didn't always translate very well. This, of course, didn't stop me from sinking several hours into the game, nor will it stop me from enjoying Chrono Trigger, should this rumor pan out. I do, however, think that, when trying to adapt classic games for a modern audience, there's a lot to be said for sprites. See Dragon Quest IX (another Square Enix game), Odin Sphere, and Grim Grimoire for examples of beautiful sprite work.

Chrono Resurrection Playthrough

Anyway, back to Resurrection. It's a nifty little project, and it's a shame that it got cancelled. The animation was fluid and the transition into the first combat (around the 8:14 mark) was absolutely seamless, a design choice I wish more RPG developers would make. The little battle intro transition thing is jarring and adds unnecessary time to already long and sometimes tedious games. It is a convenient way to hide loading times, though. Too bad Resurrection's translation was just as bad as the original. I've never seen someone butcher English the way Frog does.

For comparison, here's some footage of the original Chrono Trigger.

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/Fan art as text adventure

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:04:55 -0500

Teta fixes it all

Teta has drawn you as a whale.
>Is this awesome? Y/N

>>Y

The Destructoid community is more attractive and more talented than you are. Also, it is unlikely that Chris Kohler gets very much fan art.
>Are you perpetually amazed? Y/N

>>Y

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>>Use shotgun

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/Scope

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:37:29 -0500

Biggest drawing in the world

Just watch.

I let out an audible gasp when I realized what was going on.

[Via Hoygeit's tumblr]

P.S. If there was a way to keep up with people's other blogs from my Vox account, that'd be sweet.

Self-defeating, but sweet.

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/Gambling! Music! LOOSE WOMEN!

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:33:31 -0500

and spitoons!

Those are the feelings evoked by the font (Rosewood Std) I used in my first-ever Destructoid c-blog banner, the result of a lack of creative vision coupled with being Photoshop retarded. Rosewood wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I started, but it was the most compelling font that came standard with my copy of Photoshop, since I didn't have internet access at the time of creation, no, evocation. After staring at it for about half an hour in the bottom of a dormitory, ostensibly helping conditional freshmen make insightful arguements about Othello and King Henry IV, Part I, the Rosewood started to grow on me, and I really can't be dicked with changing it. It'll do, at least until (if?) I get any feedback on more viable options.

Whatever -- I made it, it's mine. Just don't laff.

Even with a wider variety of typefaces available to me at my work computer, I don't feel particularly pressed to alter it. Besides, Rosewood Std might be the only font that looks good (?) in yellow. That being said, though, I'm going to make it a point to steal some of this computer's more interesting fonts for my own use, particularly an Edwardian Script, Desdemona, Colonna MT, and bauhaus 93.

While I enjoyed cobbling this banner together like some sort of trendy machinist, I don't know how much creative juice I have left in me. I considered similarly mishmashing something together for Nathan, my roomate, who is equally devoid of Dtoid banner imagery, but I realized that my only ideas were variations on the theme. It's an aesthetic I enjoy, at the expense of not being able to do anything else. This is due in part, I hope, with my limited knowledge of Photoshop. Perhaps as I acquire more tools, I'll be able to drum up something more compelling and complex.

Nevertheless, I'm happy with it, and it works a lot better than the shitty Undertow concept art that I had been using as a place holder for over a year.

The banner is composed of clips from: a picture of an art piece that Andrea took the last time we went to Chattanooga. It's one of many steel and wire crows perched throughout downtown; Hermes from Persona 3; and a Destructoidification of counterculture icon Ken Kesey, courtesy of itemforty. The other three images are from various and sundry wallpaper images floating around my nebulous hard drive.

P.S. I think I have some spyware on my work computer that is preventing my browser from accessing Photobucket. Which means that any Photobucket-hosted images appear broken, or not at all. The internet is broken.

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/Turn a mother out

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:52:58 -0500

Picasso - La Vie

Two weekends ago, I had the delightful opportunity to go to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (which is a user-friendly way to say "art museum") in Nashville. I had a bevvy of other things to do, since my life is so action-packed and fabulous, but I (correctly) reasoned that I'd never go to an art museum without a little prodding. Besides, art is dank.

The Frist is brand new, in the heart of Nashville, and looks totally generic. It doesn't have a permanent collection, only a series of traveling exhibitions from bigger, classier, more culturally relevant museums. Which isn't to say that the Frist isn't really cool and neat and posh in its own right.

Nevertheless, the Frist currently houses an impressive collection called From Monet to Dali, a series of paintings and sculptures from the Cleveland Museum of Art that chronicles the evolution of art from realism to surrealism. The collection seems relatively standard and academic, and I recognized a lot of the work from my obligatory and perfunctory art history classes, but it's impressive nonetheless. I know I should've picked up on the way art has evolved and which elements from X period were used to create art from Y, but to be honest, I didn't really see it. Obviously, I can tell the difference between impressionism and surrealism, but I never really got a sense of evolution or progress or development as I moved through the galleries. I like art and all, but I can't say I have a particular knack for it.

What was impressive, however, was the sheer scope of the works. Gustave Courbet's Dent du Midi and Picasso's La Vie, for example, are both enormous. They are surprsingly, overwhelmingly big. One of the results of such grandiose works, and the Frist's particular habit of there being nothing separating you and the painting (seriously, what's stopping people from just pawing and drooling on them?), is the startling amount of physical detail available to the casual viewer. Being able to see individual brush strokes and the cracks and creases in the paint cemented these prints as tangible physical works. Picasso is no longer relegated to being some sort of abstract historical figure -- he was a real man, with real hands, and real paint who really worked on an enormous painting. I know because I saw it. Obviously, academically I knew that Picasso was a real guy, but the ability to see the tangible results of his mind really brought that concept home for me.

Courbet - Les Dents du Midi

Also, Artstor doesn't work in Firefox. Fuck that

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/WTFuck

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:48:46 -0600

I can't imagine what kind of synaptic misfire led to the utterance of this gem:

I want to fuck the world. Stick my dick in a volcano.

Assuming he goes to school here, he will, ostensibly, acquire a degree, and be considered an "expert" in his field of choice.

In light of volcano-fucking, the above realization scares the shit out of me.

Pictures unrelated:

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/Moonspeak

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:55:12 -0600

Instead of

cleaning my room
writing one of 5 papers I have due in as many days

reading the growing stack of books and articles that would, ostensibly, help me write those aforementioned papers
transcribing any number of interviews from back in October

working on any of several features pieces for Destructoid that are currently clogging up my Google Docs docket
honey-doing my way through a long list of errands
or, heaven the fuck forbid, actually playing video games

I've been playing with my new computer. I haven't actually done anything productive with it, mind you, but I do have it adequately personalized and shiny-looking. Like some kind of new-age, Bauhausian minimalist, I've managed to reduce my desktop to nothing but this image:

Japanese snowman?

The computer that has replaced the one lost in The Wreck is a Dell XPS M1530 with a 100 GB harddrive, an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T5450 @ 1.67 Ghz, 2.05 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA video card, for which I can't find the specs right now. Much like the moonspeak accompanying Frosty-san, I can't actually say that I know what half of those words actually mean, but I do know that they are a verifiable, tangible calculation of my e-peen. Of course.

Like a small child on Christmas day, the implications associated with my new toy are vastly overshadowed by how fucking cool it is; which is another way of saying that I haven't come to terms with the sizable dent in my point-mass pocketbook.

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/What is Tomopop?

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:59:54 -0600

Topher has created a monster. He's gotten me and mines ~~addicted to~~ interested in vinyl toys, what with his Bastardino icon and his Tirehead-dog-thing-humping-his-360. After buying some for the missus, signing up for the Tomopop newsletter (what is Tomopop?), and playing with Castle Crashers, I'm pretty sure I'm hooked.

Thankfully, web 2.0 is a vast labyrinth of deep links upon deep links, leading me to various and sondry (that's the Middle English spelling. I'm taking a Chaucer class, but more on that later) factoids, pichurrs, blog entries, and this video.

Colette's c-blog --> Colourlovers --> Digg --> Video.

"The Vinyl Frontier" Comic Con Trailer

In other news, I'm off to cover Lanwar 40, which will entail finding stones, and trying to squeeze blood out of them. After that, I will need to find a molehill, and attempt to make a mountain out of it. Maybe some sensationalist yellow journalism will make it seem more interesting than a bunch of dudes playing G.R.A.W. 2 or whateverthefuck.

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/An angel's hug from behind her is her seatbelt

nobody@vox.com(orcist) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 00:07:25 -0600

Daedelus - Fair Weather Friends

When andrea sent me the video to the right, I instantly fell in love with it. It's just so happy and catchy and layered (you know I dig on that), and the animation is everything that I love right now. I don't know enough about pop art to know what I'm trying to say, but I'm totally in love with the little characters and the Web 2.0 curves. The only description I can think of is it that makes me think of vinyl toys. I spend a lot of time looking at Tokidoki and StrangeCo and if it weren't so cost prohibitive, I would be snatching them all up. Is there a catchy buzzword or -ism that I can use in the future, just for clarity and brevity's sake?

Anyway, YouTube's "Related Videos" feature is a godsend, especially when it comes to obscure indie artists and their obscur-er videos. I don't know ... is Daedalus obscure any more? I'm so out of touch, I couldn't begin to tell you about his hipster status. Maybe he sold out, for all I know. Whatever -- I like the fuck out of him, and have since I discovered him in high school through Epitonic. "Quiet Now" by Busdriver is by far the best track on the little collection there, but they're all worth a listen. And they're free! And legal!

So yeah, more Daedalus videos -- all poppy, all catchy, all with a similar aesthetic, all jawsome.

A friend and I were discussing music videos a few days ago (specifically Animal Collective's "Peacebone") and I came to the conclusion that I wasn't sure why artists made them any more. I can't remember the last time I actually saw one on TV, much less one that was visually and orally compelling. But then I just spent an hour watching artsy-fartsy Daedalus videos and I remembered why people still make them: because they can be fucking awesome.

P.S. The fine folks at NinjaTune have Daedalus' Fair Weather Friends EP available for stream. See Orcist stream. Stream, Orcist, stream.

Daedelus - Just Briefly

Daedelus feat. Busdriver and Pigeon John - Something Bells

Daedelus - Sundown

Daedelus - Lights Out

Daedelus - Taking Wing

Animal Collective - Peacebone

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