At AdultSwim.com we just launched our second original game, Bible Fight. So far it's gotten a lot of attention, though the buildup of traffic has been slower than it was for Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself).
The road to this game was actually very long. When we decided to do original games, we put out a call for original pitches from some of our more trusted game developers. One of our best developers, Pop&Co., came back with a number of pitches for original games. One of the standout ideas was Bible Fight. Lazzo liked it and it seemed like it was a go. But then there was some internal disagreement and some personnel reshuffling and all in all the game was almost a year from conception to launch...which is incredibly long for most Flash games.
I've been googling the game and reading some of the comments people have about it, most of which are very positive. A lot of the very Christian replies were the most interesting, as some take it in stride and actually find it funny, while some are mortally offended. I won't try to convince anyone about it, but I found it funny and thought it was a worthwhile game to pursue. There were actually some very vocal internal disagreements about it, though, so we didn't make it lightly. We discussed it for hours on end, but I think we made the right choice to go ahead with it.
Anyway. I'm proud of the final result. I think it's one of the better fighting games on the internet. I just hope everyone who plays it can just have some fun with it and not take everything so seriously. ;)
Monday, May 14, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Xbox Live Account Lost
So about a month ago my Xbox 360 started getting the infamous Red Ring of Death. It wasn't completely surprising -- mine was one of the earlier 360s and more prone to malfunctions than the later ones, though up to now I'd had no problems -- but dismaying, since I'd just gotten back into playing Gears of War online. I'd remembered that Costco had a fantastic return policy that I figured would be easier than sending the console away (thanks, Costco!) so I switched it out for a new one. The problem was that they wouldn't let me keep my hard drive. Something about serial numbers needing to match. Okay, whatever. I didn't care about old game saves and any Live Arcade stuff I'd gotten I could just re-download, right?
Yeah. I get the new box home, set it up and start inputting my Xbox Live info. Wait...what password did I use again? Jeez, it was like a year and a half ago that I set this up... ah ha! It was my old Comcast email account I used back when I had Comcast! Crap! What's the password? I tried all the passwords I could ever remember using, and nothing. Then I get locked out. I've tried logging in too many times and now I'll have to reset my password. Which would be fine...except I no longer have access to that email! It was a Comcast-provided email address and I'd switched to BellSouth about seven months ago.
Okay. So I call Xbox. They can't help me, it's all run through their Windows Live ID service. Alright, I go to the website they direct me to, fill out all the forms and wait for them to get back to me. The answer I get is a very obviously cut-and-pasted "To reset your password...blah blah blah." I write back that I can't reset my password, which is the real problem here. I get someone new as a response and I explain the situation again. I get another -- yes ANOTHER new person and by now I'm getting exasperated. I plead with them to verify any other information they want, credit card, phone number, whatever, just please, switch my account to my current email! They respond -- I should call the XBox people. They could verify my credit card number.
And of course they can't. I spend half an hour speaking to a very nice Customer Service supervisor, begging to be connected to anyone who works at the Windows Live ID service, but she has no phone number for them. It's like they're this ghost department that no one can really contact except by email. I demand to speak to someone further up but it becomes clear that they're just an outsourced company with no real ties to Microsoft. They don't know anything.
So I send a long, impassioned plea back to the Windows Live ID people. And apparently they've stopped replying to me. I decide to bite the bullet and even subscribed to Comcast internet for a month to get access to that email account back. Turns out that somehow during the time that I've no longer had Comcast, someone's come along and taken that email out from under me. SO that's a bust.
After I got back from my vacation today I called the direct Microsoft number and got directed to literally seven different people. Please, I said. Just connect me with anyone who happens to have a phone at their desk in the Windows Live ID department. The last guy I speak to tries to lay on me that the Windows Live ID service doesn't have phone support because it's a free service. I have to ask if so little support is going to be made available for it, why tie it into services that are NOT free? I'm out a year's subscription to XBox Live and several games and TV shows. So he offers to put me on the line to Microsoft Corporate. I say great! Let me talk to the suits. So I hear "Please wait while I transfer you to 1-800-Micrsoft!" and I almost squeeze the phone apart. That was the number I called to begin with.
I mean, jeez, am I being unreasonable here? What's worse, is that it's actually part of my job to play these games. I run the games department for AdultSwim.com and it's actually fairly imperative that I stay on top of what's going on in gaming. I just don't know what else to do here!
Yeah. I get the new box home, set it up and start inputting my Xbox Live info. Wait...what password did I use again? Jeez, it was like a year and a half ago that I set this up... ah ha! It was my old Comcast email account I used back when I had Comcast! Crap! What's the password? I tried all the passwords I could ever remember using, and nothing. Then I get locked out. I've tried logging in too many times and now I'll have to reset my password. Which would be fine...except I no longer have access to that email! It was a Comcast-provided email address and I'd switched to BellSouth about seven months ago.
Okay. So I call Xbox. They can't help me, it's all run through their Windows Live ID service. Alright, I go to the website they direct me to, fill out all the forms and wait for them to get back to me. The answer I get is a very obviously cut-and-pasted "To reset your password...blah blah blah." I write back that I can't reset my password, which is the real problem here. I get someone new as a response and I explain the situation again. I get another -- yes ANOTHER new person and by now I'm getting exasperated. I plead with them to verify any other information they want, credit card, phone number, whatever, just please, switch my account to my current email! They respond -- I should call the XBox people. They could verify my credit card number.
And of course they can't. I spend half an hour speaking to a very nice Customer Service supervisor, begging to be connected to anyone who works at the Windows Live ID service, but she has no phone number for them. It's like they're this ghost department that no one can really contact except by email. I demand to speak to someone further up but it becomes clear that they're just an outsourced company with no real ties to Microsoft. They don't know anything.
So I send a long, impassioned plea back to the Windows Live ID people. And apparently they've stopped replying to me. I decide to bite the bullet and even subscribed to Comcast internet for a month to get access to that email account back. Turns out that somehow during the time that I've no longer had Comcast, someone's come along and taken that email out from under me. SO that's a bust.
After I got back from my vacation today I called the direct Microsoft number and got directed to literally seven different people. Please, I said. Just connect me with anyone who happens to have a phone at their desk in the Windows Live ID department. The last guy I speak to tries to lay on me that the Windows Live ID service doesn't have phone support because it's a free service. I have to ask if so little support is going to be made available for it, why tie it into services that are NOT free? I'm out a year's subscription to XBox Live and several games and TV shows. So he offers to put me on the line to Microsoft Corporate. I say great! Let me talk to the suits. So I hear "Please wait while I transfer you to 1-800-Micrsoft!" and I almost squeeze the phone apart. That was the number I called to begin with.
I mean, jeez, am I being unreasonable here? What's worse, is that it's actually part of my job to play these games. I run the games department for AdultSwim.com and it's actually fairly imperative that I stay on top of what's going on in gaming. I just don't know what else to do here!
Sunday, March 11, 2007
GDC '07
So the Game Developer's Conference for 2007 is over. Oh my God, that was a long week.
Day 0
Sunday. I fly out at ten...which meant that I missed my neice's first birthday party. Wow, did I feel like a tool for not having gotten a later flight. I still feel bad about that. But the flight itself was pretty uneventful. The seats each had built-in TVs you could order movies and watch TV on, which was a welcome entertainment addition, though most of the flight I just watched Mike Judge's Idiocracy on my iPod. (Which I'd give a six out of ten. Kind of funny, but not entirely original and not really up to the Office Space legacy.) I struck up a brief conversation with a nice French lady who was flying straight from a vacation in Africa to meet her copatriots in San Fransisco. Apparantly she worked for eBay France.
I landed, took a really expensive taxi to the hotel, thought I saw the Golden Gate bridge but didn't, and settled in to my week in San Fransisco.
San Fransisco is a beautiful city. It's antique and modern all at the same time. I remember thinking how much I wished I could stay and extra week just on vacation. Just a very unique place, and I thought immediately that this was one of my favorite cities I had ever been to.
I bought some pizza, had a fantastic rasperry gelato and ate dinner at a place called Max's. Then back to the hotel for sleeping.
Day 1
Monday. I followed a large group of dorky-looking people (believe me, I blended right in) to the Moscone Center, registered, grabbed a rice crispy treat and a pear from the cafe and went to my assigned room.
The first two days of the GDC are for "Tutorials." These can be classes, mini-conferences, whatever. Most people don't go and just fly in for the big Wednesday show. I wanted to catch the tutorials because I wanted to learn more about game design. So I took the Game Design Tutorial. It was a blast, really. I had no idea redesigning board games could be so entertaining. (I created the absolute best four-player version of "Three Musketeers" that has ever been made. It balanced perfectly, was perfectly symmetrical and I actually had a great time playing it. Maybe I'll post instructions later.)
I met a game designer from Longtail Studios named AJ, and we hung out a little afterwards. He's a nice guy, but has a total naive view on whether or not first-person shooters will be a good fit for the Wii. ;)
Walking back from the bar where I'd met AJ and one of his co-workers, I got lost in the Tenderloin.
I get lost everywhere I go. It's like a trip hasn't started until I get lost, and I started this one early. It was pretty seedy, with more massage parlors than homeless people (which there were also plenty of.) It took me twenty minutes before I realized I had turned the wrong way on Geary and turned around, trying to look as mean and intimidating as I possibly could, until the mild Tenderloin squalor abruptly dead-ended into the polished, tourist sheen of Union Square. Really a very odd thing, both those places being pretty much back-to back. But I made it back and fell asleep with no real trouble.
Day 2
Tuesday. More Game design tutorial. Starting to get brain-dead and grumpy. The last exercise of the day, I almost chewed this woman's head off because she made us spend half an hour making lists about what we could do for the assignment rather than just picking something and iterating on it.
I also met with Nik from Tiny Mantis, the game company that did "Go Right!" for us. Hopefully they'll be making some games that don't suck with us. ;)
On an odd note, I ran into Michael Sinterniklaas standing in the lunch line. Mike is the voice of Dean Venture from the Venture Bros. and a million other voices. He owns his own recording studio in New York called "New York Post," which I had visited on my trip to New York last year. He was there on an Audio Pass, trying to network and gather business from the game industry. Later that night I met him at the East meets West party, which he helped me crash. I played pool with a college student, chatted with Mike for a bit, talked with Stephanie Sheh of Eureka Seven and Bleach fame, then called it a night. It should be clear by now, I'm not a big partier.
Day 3
Wednesday. The first day of the conference proper. Chris Kelly flew in the night before and I hung with him most of the day. Highlights: Susan O'Connor's talk on writing for Gears of War, and the Sony Presentation.
Here's my opinion on Playstation Home. I don't see the point. It's a Second-Life knockoff that will be limited to the few people who actually have PS3s. It takes things literally to an awkward extreme: why should I have to walk into a room and sort, closet-like, to view my achievements when I could just pull up a list, which lends itself to comparisons with friends and other simple data display techniques. It just seems like a stupidly obvious thing to do, so I don't know why everyone's raving about it so much.
LittleBigPlanet, however, looks nothing short of amazing. Almost worth my six hundred bucks. Almost.
During the day we met with some new game vendors who wanted ask us questions about our games strategy. That night I went to the Minna Mingle party for Casual Game developers and met with the guys from Pop, who are doing the upcoming game Bible Fight for us. I was so exhausted by this point, though, I only stayed for about half an hour.
Day 4
Thursday. Oh my god, was I tired. I was sore all over from all the walking. Went to a few roundtables, a few writer sessions, trolled the Expo. Met with some more game vendors. If you can tell, toward the end of the week it all started to blur together, so I'm having difficulty recalling what exactly happened when. Miyamoto's speach at the Nintendo keynote was interesting, but kind of lacked much more than a reiteration of Nintendo's party line of "Taking risks." Refused an invitation to hang out with AJ again and crashed to an instant sleep at 8pm.
Day 5
Friday. I'm having a hard time remembering what happened Friday, to be honest. I went to a roundtable about web games and community, which reaffirmed my belief that no one was thinking about doing the sort of things I'm thinking about doing in that space. Which is either good news for me, or just shows that I'm thinking the wrong way. We'll have to see which. I went to a very memorable lecture/roundtable on emotion in gaming, which coincidentally enough came to a few emotionally-charged shouting matches on whether gameplay and story were equally important. Very informative and entertaining.
That night we went to the Zuni Cafe and had dinner. It was good, I just wished there had been more of it. Took the subway back to the hotel. Fell asleep.
Day 6
Saturday. Over. Came home. Feels good. Rented Casino Royale on the plane and wished I hadn't. I like the movie alright, but I hated that I paid five bucks for something I'd already seen. Watched an episode of the fairly mediocre Robin Hood on BBC America.
Now it's back to work to apply everything I've learned. Which I hope will eventually all come back to me. All in all I had a great time, but what a draining week.
Day 0
Sunday. I fly out at ten...which meant that I missed my neice's first birthday party. Wow, did I feel like a tool for not having gotten a later flight. I still feel bad about that. But the flight itself was pretty uneventful. The seats each had built-in TVs you could order movies and watch TV on, which was a welcome entertainment addition, though most of the flight I just watched Mike Judge's Idiocracy on my iPod. (Which I'd give a six out of ten. Kind of funny, but not entirely original and not really up to the Office Space legacy.) I struck up a brief conversation with a nice French lady who was flying straight from a vacation in Africa to meet her copatriots in San Fransisco. Apparantly she worked for eBay France.
I landed, took a really expensive taxi to the hotel, thought I saw the Golden Gate bridge but didn't, and settled in to my week in San Fransisco.
San Fransisco is a beautiful city. It's antique and modern all at the same time. I remember thinking how much I wished I could stay and extra week just on vacation. Just a very unique place, and I thought immediately that this was one of my favorite cities I had ever been to.
I bought some pizza, had a fantastic rasperry gelato and ate dinner at a place called Max's. Then back to the hotel for sleeping.
Day 1
Monday. I followed a large group of dorky-looking people (believe me, I blended right in) to the Moscone Center, registered, grabbed a rice crispy treat and a pear from the cafe and went to my assigned room.
The first two days of the GDC are for "Tutorials." These can be classes, mini-conferences, whatever. Most people don't go and just fly in for the big Wednesday show. I wanted to catch the tutorials because I wanted to learn more about game design. So I took the Game Design Tutorial. It was a blast, really. I had no idea redesigning board games could be so entertaining. (I created the absolute best four-player version of "Three Musketeers" that has ever been made. It balanced perfectly, was perfectly symmetrical and I actually had a great time playing it. Maybe I'll post instructions later.)
I met a game designer from Longtail Studios named AJ, and we hung out a little afterwards. He's a nice guy, but has a total naive view on whether or not first-person shooters will be a good fit for the Wii. ;)
Walking back from the bar where I'd met AJ and one of his co-workers, I got lost in the Tenderloin.
I get lost everywhere I go. It's like a trip hasn't started until I get lost, and I started this one early. It was pretty seedy, with more massage parlors than homeless people (which there were also plenty of.) It took me twenty minutes before I realized I had turned the wrong way on Geary and turned around, trying to look as mean and intimidating as I possibly could, until the mild Tenderloin squalor abruptly dead-ended into the polished, tourist sheen of Union Square. Really a very odd thing, both those places being pretty much back-to back. But I made it back and fell asleep with no real trouble.
Day 2
Tuesday. More Game design tutorial. Starting to get brain-dead and grumpy. The last exercise of the day, I almost chewed this woman's head off because she made us spend half an hour making lists about what we could do for the assignment rather than just picking something and iterating on it.
I also met with Nik from Tiny Mantis, the game company that did "Go Right!" for us. Hopefully they'll be making some games that don't suck with us. ;)
On an odd note, I ran into Michael Sinterniklaas standing in the lunch line. Mike is the voice of Dean Venture from the Venture Bros. and a million other voices. He owns his own recording studio in New York called "New York Post," which I had visited on my trip to New York last year. He was there on an Audio Pass, trying to network and gather business from the game industry. Later that night I met him at the East meets West party, which he helped me crash. I played pool with a college student, chatted with Mike for a bit, talked with Stephanie Sheh of Eureka Seven and Bleach fame, then called it a night. It should be clear by now, I'm not a big partier.
Day 3
Wednesday. The first day of the conference proper. Chris Kelly flew in the night before and I hung with him most of the day. Highlights: Susan O'Connor's talk on writing for Gears of War, and the Sony Presentation.
Here's my opinion on Playstation Home. I don't see the point. It's a Second-Life knockoff that will be limited to the few people who actually have PS3s. It takes things literally to an awkward extreme: why should I have to walk into a room and sort, closet-like, to view my achievements when I could just pull up a list, which lends itself to comparisons with friends and other simple data display techniques. It just seems like a stupidly obvious thing to do, so I don't know why everyone's raving about it so much.
LittleBigPlanet, however, looks nothing short of amazing. Almost worth my six hundred bucks. Almost.
During the day we met with some new game vendors who wanted ask us questions about our games strategy. That night I went to the Minna Mingle party for Casual Game developers and met with the guys from Pop, who are doing the upcoming game Bible Fight for us. I was so exhausted by this point, though, I only stayed for about half an hour.
Day 4
Thursday. Oh my god, was I tired. I was sore all over from all the walking. Went to a few roundtables, a few writer sessions, trolled the Expo. Met with some more game vendors. If you can tell, toward the end of the week it all started to blur together, so I'm having difficulty recalling what exactly happened when. Miyamoto's speach at the Nintendo keynote was interesting, but kind of lacked much more than a reiteration of Nintendo's party line of "Taking risks." Refused an invitation to hang out with AJ again and crashed to an instant sleep at 8pm.
Day 5
Friday. I'm having a hard time remembering what happened Friday, to be honest. I went to a roundtable about web games and community, which reaffirmed my belief that no one was thinking about doing the sort of things I'm thinking about doing in that space. Which is either good news for me, or just shows that I'm thinking the wrong way. We'll have to see which. I went to a very memorable lecture/roundtable on emotion in gaming, which coincidentally enough came to a few emotionally-charged shouting matches on whether gameplay and story were equally important. Very informative and entertaining.
That night we went to the Zuni Cafe and had dinner. It was good, I just wished there had been more of it. Took the subway back to the hotel. Fell asleep.
Day 6
Saturday. Over. Came home. Feels good. Rented Casino Royale on the plane and wished I hadn't. I like the movie alright, but I hated that I paid five bucks for something I'd already seen. Watched an episode of the fairly mediocre Robin Hood on BBC America.
Now it's back to work to apply everything I've learned. Which I hope will eventually all come back to me. All in all I had a great time, but what a draining week.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
RunBinary
Hi, everyone. After a lot of thought and a few conversations with a few people, I've decided to stop doing RunBinary.
Why? I think it can be best summed up in an email conversation I had with Cory Doctorow. Basically, he was advising me that all releasing your work online does is to allow you a way to evangelize fans. You have to be able to push your work onto other people and have them want to turn someone else on to it. You kind of have to be this taste-making marketing machine (my words, not his.) I'm just not very good at that. Better in my case, I think, to concentrate on actually writing things and not trying to "network" the site everywhere, because all that does is leave a bad taste in my mouth.
So I think I'll stick with submitting my work to print publishers. As much as I would have loved to be on the forefront of the digital literature revolution, I just don't think I'm cut out for it.
I'm still going to keep the blog up, as I kind of enjoy writing in it from time to time. I'm happy with what the RunBinary experience did for me; I've got some new stories and it's helped me to get work done on my own deadlines. Perhaps one day I'll come back to it, but for now it's just not a good fit for me.
Thanks to everyone that read my stories.
Why? I think it can be best summed up in an email conversation I had with Cory Doctorow. Basically, he was advising me that all releasing your work online does is to allow you a way to evangelize fans. You have to be able to push your work onto other people and have them want to turn someone else on to it. You kind of have to be this taste-making marketing machine (my words, not his.) I'm just not very good at that. Better in my case, I think, to concentrate on actually writing things and not trying to "network" the site everywhere, because all that does is leave a bad taste in my mouth.
So I think I'll stick with submitting my work to print publishers. As much as I would have loved to be on the forefront of the digital literature revolution, I just don't think I'm cut out for it.
I'm still going to keep the blog up, as I kind of enjoy writing in it from time to time. I'm happy with what the RunBinary experience did for me; I've got some new stories and it's helped me to get work done on my own deadlines. Perhaps one day I'll come back to it, but for now it's just not a good fit for me.
Thanks to everyone that read my stories.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Adsense!
Today I would like to announce that with 1157 page impressions and 2 clicks, I have now made $.01 from the good people at Google Adsense.
It's hard to know who to thank at a time like this. When I initially decided to put adsense banners up, it was on the off chance that if for some reason I had an unexpected (and unlikely) avalanche of traffic that would put me out of pocket on bandwidth I could at least recoup a little money back...but this is totally unexpected. This is just a completely spontaneous windfall for me. I mean...what do I do with it?
Well, if a hundred times more people visited I could conceivably buy something off the McDonald's dollar menu, but by the time it happened I think inflation and the rising cost of processed meat would make that a financially unsound investment. If fifty times as many visited I could get through the toll on GA-400, but I never really use 400 anyway (but I never have enough change to get through anyway, so perhaps this would be a wiser move that I would have initially thought.) If two hundred thousand times as many people came I could finally buy a Wii! That sounds like a good goal to shoot for.
Not that it matters yet. Google won't release any money to you until you've made $100 anyway, so I have a little while to plan.
Thank you, Google Adsense!
It's hard to know who to thank at a time like this. When I initially decided to put adsense banners up, it was on the off chance that if for some reason I had an unexpected (and unlikely) avalanche of traffic that would put me out of pocket on bandwidth I could at least recoup a little money back...but this is totally unexpected. This is just a completely spontaneous windfall for me. I mean...what do I do with it?
Well, if a hundred times more people visited I could conceivably buy something off the McDonald's dollar menu, but by the time it happened I think inflation and the rising cost of processed meat would make that a financially unsound investment. If fifty times as many visited I could get through the toll on GA-400, but I never really use 400 anyway (but I never have enough change to get through anyway, so perhaps this would be a wiser move that I would have initially thought.) If two hundred thousand times as many people came I could finally buy a Wii! That sounds like a good goal to shoot for.
Not that it matters yet. Google won't release any money to you until you've made $100 anyway, so I have a little while to plan.
Thank you, Google Adsense!
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Tales From Music School: Part One
Many people who know me now are surprised to learn that I used to be a jazz musician. Or at least, a jazz musician in training. I went to Georgia State University for two years for jazz, then transferred to the very prestigious University of North Florida for another two. It's a fascinating culture filled with some very interesting people and I've always wanted an excuse to write about it.
First, I want to start with what was a very influential precursor to my college career, the GHP program. If you've never heard of it, it's a summer program in Georgia that takes rising juniors and seniors and basically puts them into a University setting for six weeks. You live in the dorms, you take classes. I got in through the jazz program, taught by a funny little man named Fritz. I had elected to go there instead of on a trip to Canada with the rest of my high school band, which I kind of regretted at the time.
My roomate was this little puckish guy named Michael. He was this sort of rebellious Catholic intellectual who described his religion as "sandpapering your soul" whenever you did something bad. He was there for Social Studies I think. We used to discuss philosophy in the way only pretentious teenagers can; vigorously and very knowingly. We had cable in our room (a new experience for me. Back home in rural Georgia I was just ecstatic to get the UHF channels) and he and I discovered Space Ghost together.
[Side Note: it's actually amazing how influential something like that could be. We thought Space Ghost was the fucking greatest thing in the world. The. Fucking. Greatest. I actually went in some of my free time to look on the internet for more information about it. It was only the second time I'd ever been on the internet and to think that when I looked at the Space Ghost site that was up then I was looking into my own future. I ended up working with many of the people who were responsible for that site and what would be the first glimmerings of Adult Swim. If I had never watched that show with Michael, where would I be now?]
The jazz program itself was a mishmash of egos and more egos. It comes with the territory. I was a flashy, prideful trumpet player back then. I was into Clifford Brown and Arturo Sandoval. High notes and fast lines. Problem was, I never learned how to improvise the right way. It was unfathomable to me at that time that someone could actually read every single chord change and improvise to it. So like any pretentious ass would, I took shortcuts. The chromatic scale was my friend because no matter what you played, you were only a half step away from the right note. And I could play it fast. So the first night we were there we had a jam session.
A note about jam sessions. Later I would realize what they really were: masturbation sessions where instrumentalists got to pull their cocks out and compare sizes. The song we played that night was Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia, as cliche a jam session song as you could ask for. It also featured a nice break in between choruses so those of us who couldn't keep up with the changes would know where were were.
I came out blazing. I stepped up, put my Harmon mute in ("yeah," they said, only because they'd seen Miles with a Harmon and that meant it was the Real Deal) and played as fast and as high as I could. People were floored, I think, with my speed and seeming virtuosity. It wasn't until two weeks later that the whole thing collapsed when someone thought to ask "Hey...are you just playing the chromatic scale?"
I met two people there that would be a great influence on me later on in college. The first was the other trumpet player, Tommy. He was a jerk, but a nice guy. If you know somebody like him you'll know what I mean. He spent the entire time calling out "Nice!" whenever someone made a mistake. He was pretty funny, so we didn't mind.
The second was Clyde, a tenor saxophonist from south Georgia. In an act of very uncharacteristic gregariousness, I invited myself to sit with him at lunch one day because I liked the way he played and he seemed like a cool guy. He seemed to have kept to himself until then. From that point on Clyde was one of my closest friends. He knew I was a faker, but he hung out with me anyway.
Other vague memories of GHP: Fritz used to sing the drum parts out like "Kang ta kang, ta gonk gonk," which was hilarious. I took a philosophy course as one of my minors and learned about Immanuel Kant. Read "The Island of Dr. Moreau" in another English minor class and somehow, while discussing it, revealed the ending of Phenomenon -- which apparently most of the class had not seen and now, because of me, never would. There was a young alto sax player named Dusty who was kind of a hotshot and took twenty minute solos. The other alto sax player, Reed, looked exactly like me. It was uncanny. One or two of the other kids from my school left the program early, apparently unable to deal with six weeks away from home.
One of the things I remember best about the whole experience (and I'll wrap it up with this) is hanging out with Michael and the small group of friends we accumulated. It may be difficult to understand why that was so remarkable, but in the circles I was in back in high school, things just didn't work that way. You had friends, but they were callous and funny, never thoughtful and nice. On July 19th, my birthday, I had to skip lunch because we had a rehearsal for something or other. Turns out Michael and the rest had planned a little birthday party for me, which I couldn't go to. They got me a card and everything. I was just blown away by it, and to date it's still one of the nicest, most unexpected things anyone's ever done for me.
Anyway, that's all for GHP. Not a lot to really say there, except that it really helped formulate my college years, which is where things really gets more interesting.
First, I want to start with what was a very influential precursor to my college career, the GHP program. If you've never heard of it, it's a summer program in Georgia that takes rising juniors and seniors and basically puts them into a University setting for six weeks. You live in the dorms, you take classes. I got in through the jazz program, taught by a funny little man named Fritz. I had elected to go there instead of on a trip to Canada with the rest of my high school band, which I kind of regretted at the time.
My roomate was this little puckish guy named Michael. He was this sort of rebellious Catholic intellectual who described his religion as "sandpapering your soul" whenever you did something bad. He was there for Social Studies I think. We used to discuss philosophy in the way only pretentious teenagers can; vigorously and very knowingly. We had cable in our room (a new experience for me. Back home in rural Georgia I was just ecstatic to get the UHF channels) and he and I discovered Space Ghost together.
[Side Note: it's actually amazing how influential something like that could be. We thought Space Ghost was the fucking greatest thing in the world. The. Fucking. Greatest. I actually went in some of my free time to look on the internet for more information about it. It was only the second time I'd ever been on the internet and to think that when I looked at the Space Ghost site that was up then I was looking into my own future. I ended up working with many of the people who were responsible for that site and what would be the first glimmerings of Adult Swim. If I had never watched that show with Michael, where would I be now?]
The jazz program itself was a mishmash of egos and more egos. It comes with the territory. I was a flashy, prideful trumpet player back then. I was into Clifford Brown and Arturo Sandoval. High notes and fast lines. Problem was, I never learned how to improvise the right way. It was unfathomable to me at that time that someone could actually read every single chord change and improvise to it. So like any pretentious ass would, I took shortcuts. The chromatic scale was my friend because no matter what you played, you were only a half step away from the right note. And I could play it fast. So the first night we were there we had a jam session.
A note about jam sessions. Later I would realize what they really were: masturbation sessions where instrumentalists got to pull their cocks out and compare sizes. The song we played that night was Dizzy Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia, as cliche a jam session song as you could ask for. It also featured a nice break in between choruses so those of us who couldn't keep up with the changes would know where were were.
I came out blazing. I stepped up, put my Harmon mute in ("yeah," they said, only because they'd seen Miles with a Harmon and that meant it was the Real Deal) and played as fast and as high as I could. People were floored, I think, with my speed and seeming virtuosity. It wasn't until two weeks later that the whole thing collapsed when someone thought to ask "Hey...are you just playing the chromatic scale?"
I met two people there that would be a great influence on me later on in college. The first was the other trumpet player, Tommy. He was a jerk, but a nice guy. If you know somebody like him you'll know what I mean. He spent the entire time calling out "Nice!" whenever someone made a mistake. He was pretty funny, so we didn't mind.
The second was Clyde, a tenor saxophonist from south Georgia. In an act of very uncharacteristic gregariousness, I invited myself to sit with him at lunch one day because I liked the way he played and he seemed like a cool guy. He seemed to have kept to himself until then. From that point on Clyde was one of my closest friends. He knew I was a faker, but he hung out with me anyway.
Other vague memories of GHP: Fritz used to sing the drum parts out like "Kang ta kang, ta gonk gonk," which was hilarious. I took a philosophy course as one of my minors and learned about Immanuel Kant. Read "The Island of Dr. Moreau" in another English minor class and somehow, while discussing it, revealed the ending of Phenomenon -- which apparently most of the class had not seen and now, because of me, never would. There was a young alto sax player named Dusty who was kind of a hotshot and took twenty minute solos. The other alto sax player, Reed, looked exactly like me. It was uncanny. One or two of the other kids from my school left the program early, apparently unable to deal with six weeks away from home.
One of the things I remember best about the whole experience (and I'll wrap it up with this) is hanging out with Michael and the small group of friends we accumulated. It may be difficult to understand why that was so remarkable, but in the circles I was in back in high school, things just didn't work that way. You had friends, but they were callous and funny, never thoughtful and nice. On July 19th, my birthday, I had to skip lunch because we had a rehearsal for something or other. Turns out Michael and the rest had planned a little birthday party for me, which I couldn't go to. They got me a card and everything. I was just blown away by it, and to date it's still one of the nicest, most unexpected things anyone's ever done for me.
Anyway, that's all for GHP. Not a lot to really say there, except that it really helped formulate my college years, which is where things really gets more interesting.
Monday, February 12, 2007
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Hey, somebody's put in a Digg story about the site. How awesome is that? So...digg me already!
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