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Entries from November 2009

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New T7ES song: 12% of 360kb (22 Nov 2009 at 17:37)

New Tom 7 Entertainment System tune, 12% of 360kb.

Tom 7 Entertainment System - 12% of 360kb

Categories: t7es mp3

(7 comments — almost 15 years ago) [ comment ]

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Action Jackson MS (12 Nov 2009 at 09:00)

It was a special shame/privilege (tried to come up with a good sounding portmanteau expressing this sentiment; failed; any luck?) to find myself looking at cplusplus.com and to see an animated Microsoft Windows VII advertisement that uses my 13 year-old font Action Jackson:

It is truly my most popular child. I looked around: It turns out that the font is actually part of Microsoft's current enterprise software branding campaign "the NEW efficiency". You'll see it in whenever they try to sell their expensive stuff by the hundreds to CTOs; e.g.

I like to imagine some guys in suits trading whitepapers. The most surreal is their launch event hooha which has extremely boring videos of señor people giving powerpoint presentations which include this branding. For example, join them for the launch event (warning, you need Silverlight and then you gotta wait to download a LOT of this animated lady that's going to be your personal liaison).

(In old, non-ironic sightings news, Tadbot spotted One Constant used on the Scribblenauts site, which game looks awesome.)

Categories: sightings fonts

(12 comments — almost 15 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from October 2009

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Sick Day video (26 Oct 2009 at 09:31)

Behold! A new music video by my band, Sick Ridiculous (&c.). Nels and I filmed this a few weeks ago and I just finally got the time to put it all together this weekend. The song is Sick Day, which is sort of our band theme song, and easily one of my favorites. Watch:

Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous — Sick Day

Please consider watching in HD at Vimeo, or even downloading the 1080p original from that page. This is some life-size pro shit we're talking about here. The recording is new, too; get the Sick Day MP3 for your growing collection.

Also: We are playing this Thursday at Smiling Moose in the South Side, upstairs. We're opening for Sound Of Urchin (and others), who themselves opened for Tenacious D on a recent tour. Yes, we are now in the Six Degrees of Billy Joel territory. If you're in the mood to rock, come see us! The Facebook event has all the deets. Costumes encouraged.

Categories: mp3 video sick ridiculous

(6 comments — 15 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from September 2009

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30th birthday: Cake Quest (28 Sep 2009 at 00:21)

Sunday I turned 30, as in years. The celebration started Friday when we had a great combo-party (Brianne's birthday on Saturday) in my space age bachelor pad. I hardly ever host parties in my place so I was a little nervous. It turned out almost ideally; like maybe 50 people and never got out of hand. I have one room, now known as the Observatory, which is basically empty since my brother moved to Boston, and so that room just now has a secondary colony of San Pellegrino bottles (kind of ran out of space in my own room), my answering machine (full, useless) and two seats for "Observing" these objects, like a minimalist art project. (This was great. The San Pellegrino collection really drives some people nuts and other people happily make new interactive art with it.) On Nels's suggestion we made the Observatory a bit more partied up for the party, using the projector to show Robot Jox, a classic Robots Gone Wild cold-war-forever piece. No real sound setup in there, but I could only find Spanish subtitles, so I Google-Translated those back into English, so the whole movie was subtitled in this broken doubly-translated language which was especially delightful if you also listened closely enough to the computer speakers for the original EN audio, until the text inexplicably transforms into Spanish because Google Translate gives up once it gets a certain ways into a document that you upload, cuz I guess it gets tired and is like ahem you finish this. But only a few people in there at a time because of the two seats. Most people party 4 regular in the games room, or Gallery, or murder Prof. Plum in the Kitchen with the candlestick.

The highlight for me was the Great Race, a 10K which I run every year. This year it was on Sunday morning, my birthday. Last year I ran it real hard which qualified me as a seeded runner this time, but I'm not in as good shape and anyway have retired from running 10K for speed. So I decided it's costumes. I have pretty complex requirements for a race costume. It has to be pretty conspicuous, so people spot it. It has to not get in anyone's way or be race-ejectingly illegal, because I don't want to interfere (except maybe mentally) with anybody who's taking the race seriously. It has to clearly impede my ability to run, but should also be actually harder than you'd first think. This time I also wanted a birthday theme. I mulled a bunch of ideas with friends (bunch of helium balloons was a frontrunner for a while) and eventually settled on Ryan's idea to run with a birthday cake. So I got a half-sheet cake and decorated it, and ran the whole six miles carrying it:

I can put on a smile for the camera but it didn't feel that good in the arms. It is pretty weird to run a race and for that to be the primary focus of pain. Harder than the H1N1 marathon costume, I'd say, though a much much shorter race. But running with a costume is basically always worth it. For the people you run by (observers or if you start in the back, folks you pass) the costume is new and funny, so the whole race people are laughing or making comments and in this case wishing or singing happy birthday. They love that shit because they're either waiting in the rain for the one person they know in the race to pass, which is otherwise totally monotonous, or they're hurting from running in the race and want to be distracted. And I love overhearing or having other people overhear, "You got beat by the guy carrying the cake?!" Oh yeah so it was raining, and this made the cake very wet, and the cardboard it was on start to have deteriorating conditions and buckle, so this was a disadvantage for ways one could carry it because it needed Total Underbody Support. Eventually there were only like two asymmetric (dual) ways and one symmetric way to hold the cake and I'd cycle between them every 15 seconds as my arms and back were burning up. I made it downtown with the cake about as intact as it could be, which isn't saying much:

9-27-79 NEVER FORGET

Even my birthday hat has melted. News like spectacles, so some people interviewed me. The best coverage was on KDKA (near the end, though the anchor foreshadows). There's some interviewing of me in the otherwise extremely boring (like it's mostly just video of people standing around?) WPXI Web Exclusive. See 1:55 and 3:30.

Lots of friends helped make this the best birthday weekend ever with their party-going and fun-loving and organizing and driving me to-and-fro since my license expired and I have another flat tire, and the cake eating and wearing hats in the race and writing on me and watching Steelers and not giving me presents that make me feel uncomfortably materialistic and rearranging the art bottles and taking photos and everything. Thanks!!! :)

Categories: races momentous

(9 comments — 15 years ago) [ comment ]

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Death Row Candyland (12 Sep 2009 at 11:32)

Here's a new Tom 7 Entertainment System song, Death Row Candyland. It's possibly most ambitious one ever, except for the cover art:

Tom 7 Entertainment System - Death Row Candyland

I couldn't figure out how to easily get that diagonal candy cane stripe look in 10 minutes, so instead purely vertical bands which are like their own mini prison inside the letters.

Now you want to hear me overanalyze? This song is kinda like theme from rt2i in that I spent a lot of time on it (like multiple nights), a lot of which was on texture. This is highly unusual for me. I'd go back and listen to it and think, hmm, this particular transition seems to lose too much bass, and then fix it. I didn't stop until I listened through the whole thing and thought there were no undesired jarring moments, cheesefest notes, boring off-pace repeats, or missed opportunities. (Usually I just crap it out in an hour or two binge with all default settings, and hope for the best.) I like the song better than rt2i though because I feel like the basic tune is more sound. I started with what you hear in measures 1–28 (intro, intrigue theme, main echo theme) which loop so nicely and which would easily have been the whole song in 1999-era T7ES. I really liked the twisty uneasiness of the chords and (especially) the echo theme. So I decided to embrace and extend, and the end product has at least 5 distinct parts, and maybe counting the counterpoint something like 9 or 10.

Another way this is similar to rt2i is the way that the melody from the main echo theme shows up in 3 totally different places, changing its meaning each time. I am in love with this trick these days. (For sure it's in Zürich bigtime.) It is a good challenge to pull it off (usually it means adjusting something rhythmically or melodically, and can easily lead to a muddle if clumsy) and I think that the self-reference is so damn satisfying. IMO the part in the coda where the echo theme comes back (gently telegraphed in the square waves in the prior pattern) is completely fucking epic. To me in the narrative of the song it's like something odd but familiar finally making sense.

Categories: mp3 t7es

(9 comments — 15 years ago) [ comment ]

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