Giving up the Burn

This year is the first since I have moved to California, that I will be missing Burning Man. We have a shoot in Vegas for adidas next week, and there is no way I can miss the next week of work. Steff sent me this list which I had read before, but still makes me laugh everytime I read it.

for those, like me who are sitting this one out, here
is some advice...

I recommend choosing one or more of the following activities to fill the void:

1. Tear down your house. Put it in a truck. Drive 10 hours in any direction.

2. Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Set it up, sandblast it, then break it.
3. Stack all your fans in one corner of your living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of
them.

4. Pitch your tent next to the wall of speakers in a crowded, noisy club. Go to sleep.

5. Lean back in a chair until that point where you're just about to fall over, but you catch yourself at the last moment. Hold that position for 9 hours.

6. Only use the toilet in a house that is at least 3 blocks away. Drain all the water from the toilet. Only flush it every 4 days. Hide all the toilet paper.

7. Visit a restaurant and pay them to let you alternately lie in the walk-in freezer and then sit in the oven.

8. Don't sleep for 5 days. Take a wide variety of hallucinogenic/ emotion altering drugs. Pick a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend.

9. Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don't go to a doctor.

10. Buy a new pair of favorite shoes. Throw one shoe away.

11. Spend a whole year rummaging through thrift stores for the perfect,most outrageous costume. Forget to pack it.

12. Listen to music you hate for 168 hours straight, or until you think you are going to scream. Scream. Realize you'll love the music for the rest of your life.

14. Get so drunk you can't recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for 5 hours.

15. Sprinkle dirty sand in all your food.

16. Have a 3AM soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile, and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you're hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.

Miyamoto: Game Designers Have Hit a Dead End

I am not exactly sure why I decided to put this article on my site, except that it proposed the idea that game designers have hit a dead end, and that got me thinking.

What has been released recently that really captured your imagination and stayed on the tip of your brain until you were able to sit back down with her? (This is not a rhetorical question, I am seriously asking anyone who reads to let me know.)

In the circle of friends I have, people are playing older titles, "WoW, GRAW, Halo 2, BF2" and those titles have become the nightly staple of our diet. No one seems to be playing any Action/Adventure, no Strategy, no Sports. Granted I have a very small circle of friends, but this is what I see.

For me, Oblivion was the title. It really is the only reason I turn on my 360 these days (I am back in a WoW hole for the time being). What about you?

From the article:

Ultimately, Miyamoto believes that industry folks have been asking the wrong questions. "... people in the industry ask, 'Will simulations catch on after the RPG boom?' 'What genre is the game play?' 'Who made it?' We've lost sight of essential enjoyment, which is the basis of gaming. In developing the Wii, we asked ourselves once more, 'What kind of game console do people want in their homes?'"

"We think that game designers, including us, have hit a dead-end. It's assumed you will develop for a given environment, and [the developers] don't know what they should make. To break out of this stagnation, we first have to radically change the paradigm," he explained. "We have to try destroying [the paradigm] ourselves, and see what is born out of its destruction. If this cycle isn't repeated, nothing new will be created. ... We decided to base a product around [this idea] and offer it as a challenge to the game designers of the world. So, although I don't reject today's games, if we don't do this sort of thing, no new forms of gameplay will appear."

GameDaily BIZ

Battlestar Galactica targets Xbox Live

"NBC Universal will also be targeting gamers with its PR offensive by releasing The Story So Far on Xbox Live Marketplace in its entirety. Though both seasons of Battlestar Galactica are already available on iTunes, the special will be the "first long-form program ever to be offered" on Xbox Live."

[via: GameSpot]

IRC quote of the day

"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his" - -general George S. Patton"

PAX - Ticket bought, suitcase packed

Just in time to wash the down the news of E3, PAX enters stage right. This is really the best weekend if you are a hard core gamer - whatever the fuck that means. In this case, hard core means you don't mind the wall of body odor as you enter the BYOC area, or maybe you want to split your time between table-top and BF2, or maybe you take personal pride in being a DDR robot, no matter how hard you have to sweat with 30 other dancers to prove it. Everything from the world's largest Karaoke Revolution concert to classical Final Fantasy performances under one roof.
If you are in the Seattle area, you gotta go. You just gotta. I will be there, with my sleeping bag in tow. Who said I had to ever grow up?