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Entries from January 2011

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Oh by the way my font is on the cover of the new Of Montreal album (30 Jan 2011 at 11:31)

The fonts I made in high school and college show up all over. It means that everywhere I go, some part of my brain is continuously devoted to recognizing these guys anywhere that words appear, sort of like scanning for long missing children in every crowd. Some of my friends have become similarly afflicted, e.g. Nels who spotted them up on the jumbotron and now on the back cover of the new Of Montreal album False Priest:

Action Jackson on the cover of Of Montreal's album False Priest

What's exciting about this is that this is a band I really like, a quality of a sighting perhaps only matched by Tombats on Adult Swim. This particular design is in the genre "Circus of Bad Typography", though I think it fits in quite well with the artwork, which I like a lot. Mine is the first font up there; I like to think that the designer started by replacing Default Font with mine, and then was inspired like Oh yeah, now I just need to find twelve more amateurish sharewares to complete the look. Though if I were able to pick which song to render in my font, it would be Enemy Gene, Sex Karma, Famine Affair, or Around the Way. Maybe Casualty Of You, though that one seems too uncomfortably scooped by Jeff Buckley's 'So Real' to get my full endorsement. The whole album is quite good, I recommend it.

Also bonus nearby photo on my phone, this more average sighting of AJ on a budget toy in Target:

Some budget toy that uses Action Jackson too

Categories: fonts sightings

(2 comments — almost 14 years ago) [ comment ]

Tom Murphy VII Philadelphia: Get To Snow Us. ZRH → PHL → PIT. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Voted Top 1% Most Colorfully Dressed People in All of Zurich. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Today's most difficult challenge: don't find out anything about the outcome of the Steelers game until I can watch it in a time capsule in Zurich. PIT → PHL → ZRH. almost 14 years ago · Comment

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Bakery Square, audio edition (23 Jan 2011 at 12:20)

This weekend I finally recorded this song that I wrote for our inaugural open mic at our new office, called Bakery Square. It's a rare Tom 7 song that I don't record under time constraints. I couldn't decide if it would be techno mix or acousic version or electric rock, so it is all three. Cover art:

Tom 7 – Bakery Square The lyrics here may be unpenetrable. Hints: We used to be in a building called CIC, and the office was officially known as PIT-CMU. The new one is called PIT-BAK but there was a short-lived passive-aggressive sign campaign (ineffective like all such signs) to rename it to PIT-BSQ I guess because it is a much more valuable word in Scrabble. The cubicles in this place are actually hexagonal, as illustrated above. The rest I guess will remain like some amusing memo to myself, which is how I like it.

Also, go Steelers!, who have their championship game tonight. Speaking of can't decide between techno and folk, here again is my old official folk version of unofficial Steelers song, and also the techno version, now quite amusingly out of date with respect to personnel and number of fingers in need of rings. Very sadly (to me), I will be on a redeye to Zurich for the entirety of the game, a champyinz-strength scheduling blunder.

Categories: drawings tom 7 music mp3

(0 comments — almost 3 years ago) [ comment ]

Tom Murphy VII Newly discovered problem with NATO phonetic alphabet: If your confirmation code begins with D but you are not flying on Delta, "hilarity" ensues. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Weird crimes to commit: Buy regular clothes. Expertly tailor them to unusual body dimensions. Return for store credit. almost 14 years ago · Comment

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New T7ES song: I Have A DRAM (17 Jan 2011 at 17:27)

Apologies to those who are bored by obsession with primitive waveforms and their unusual composition. But the thing about obsession is that you gotta keep doing it, so on Martin Luther King Day we have a new T7ES song:

Cover illustration for T7ES - I Have A DRAM. DIP chip rendered in large pixels.

Tom 7 Entertainment System – I Have A DRAM

Nerds alone will get the joke, but did they know that Dynamic Random Access Memory was patented in the same year that MLK died? No, because nobody knows that stuff, not even Jeopardy-playing proto-Skynet futurebots. Anyway I Have A DRAM is pretty long at 3m50s, but it contains a lot of different ideas, mostly around its weird morse-code rhythm and conspicuous dissonance that seems to be pervasive in my click-tunes recently (the other thing about obsessions is that you get new ones). Dare I claim that I've mastered the minor second? Guess it's on to some microtonal shit.

Ludum Dare followup: My game "Disco? Very!" came in 18th place in the contest, which is pretty good. (There were 242 entries!) No medals, though. Next time. I ended up rating a lot of games over break—it's one of my favorite parts to see all the different ideas and also provide nurturing feedback—and there was some memorable stuff. My recommendations: Mother Robot had an inventive play mechanic and nice atmosphere. Grand Mystic Quest of Discovery was an impressively complete NES-like (NESque?) platformer. Time Pygmy is an "Achievement-Unlocked" style exploration game with outstanding graphics, which felt a lot to me like Maniac Mansion. Dry Voices is a mysterious platformer whose conceit is frankly too clever for the LD format (spoilers and my handmade map in the massive review I posted to the game). Dinosaur Dance-Off is absurd but compelling.

Categories: drawings mp3 t7es

(3 comments — almost 14 years ago) [ comment ]

Tom Murphy VII At my company, many things will happen for no reason. But not at the end of the week when we celebrate Causal Fridays. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Good news! You can now automatically disqualify yourself from being my friend by using the phrase "to the cloud" in seriousness, especially if you raise one eyebrow in apparent brainstorm. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Like others, I foretell an imminent backlash against 'irony' and a reemergence of 'earnestness'. I will go further, predicting that the vanguard of this movement will be doggies. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Please hold on. Please set luggage cart brake to on. SFO →PIT ♪. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII When running today a dog busted through the hedges and started hunting me down. But I outran that mean hound! almost 14 years ago · Comment

No Nestlé! No, NO! — 20.6mi. in 03:36:31 (2,087ft. gain) almost 14 years ago · View

Entries from December 2010

Tom Murphy VII Power hour starting at 11:01 and ending with a shot of champagne at midnight: Brilliant! almost 14 years ago · Comment

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New T7ES EP: little o (30 Dec 2010 at 16:44)

The year's almost up, and in my "2010" folder there was only one Tom 7 Entertainment System song (Around The World). What gives? To rectify the situation, I took all the good 2010 drafts starting with the letter 'o' (loosely defined to include the digit '0'), polished them up and wrote a new one this morning, thus creating the four song little o EP:

little-o.zip

Or get them as individual tracks: olimex, opera pro, omision, 0-day weekend. Or don't. It's a free country.

Since it's a free country, I also have the following free bonuses, actually kind of by request:

Bonus #1! Soundtrack for Disco? Very!, my Ludum Dare game I just posted about. Available as disco-very.zip or three tracks: Theme from, Underground Bathroom Complex, Dance C.

Bonus #2! Soundtrack for is lands?, my Ludum Dare game from the summer. It's guitar music, all in zip: is lands? sdtk.

Categories: tom 7 music t7es mp3 drawings

(4 comments — almost 14 years ago) [ comment ]

Tom Murphy VII BDL → PHL → PIT. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Tom Murphy VII Woke up early, shoveled the driveway, packed, suffered bad coffee and classic "I'm ready, just waiting on you" while getting ready bidding game played by veterans, but the flight was canceled. It will be worth it if we get to Pepe's Pizza tonight. almost 14 years ago · Comment

Christmas Eve Farmington Canal N — 11.7mi. in 01:54:37 (411ft. gain) almost 14 years ago · View

Tom Murphy VII PIT → BDL. almost 14 years ago · Comment

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My 48-hour videogame 'Disco? Very!' for Ludum Dare #19 (20 Dec 2010 at 01:58)

This weekend I made another game all by myself, for the 48 hour game programming contest Ludum Dare:

Disco noob fails to impress disco veteran

Disco? Very! The way this works is they pick a theme on Friday night at 9pm, and then everybody makes a game for the weekend based on that theme. That theme this time, chosen by lowest common denominator vote, was discovery. Since I can't resist the 'misheard it' gag (deployed last time with islands → is lands?), my game this time is called Disco? Very!. You can play it right now in almost any web browser, because it's made in Flash. This is a dance platformer (I also like to invent a new genre) with moderately charming VGA-style graphics, lots of dance animations, a boss battle, and three new T7ES songs as its soundtrack. Plus this time there's actually something to do, and you can win the game, and it almost seems like it's on purpose! So best is to just play. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, and I was efficient throughout the weekend, though it is also sad all the stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor. For example the original intention was that when you die it plays the sound of a vinyl record scratching and the screen says: Disc over? Y! and when you win, it shows you pictured on a dancing magazine, and it's like Dis cover? Y!, etc.

I recorded a video of my screen throughout the weekend (only stopping it when I was leaving the house or sleeping), so you can see my nausea-inducing window-switching habits. It's kind of funny to see the graphics being drawn, at least. Its soundtrack is truncated versions of the game music.

Categories: drawings contests t7es video games ludum dare

(28 comments — almost 3 years ago) [ comment ]

... Dec 2010 continued

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