Electronic Entertainment Expiration

The announcement has come forth that the Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3, or Mecca, for some) has been cancelled. Penny Arcade summed it up thus:

Acting as their own outlets, publishers get much more reliable data about the efficacy of their marketing payload. Trying to project their unsullied, carefully manicured marketing message at E3 is essentially like putting a choice morsel in the bottom of a burlap sack, and then filling the bag with cats. You swing the bag around and around, at which point dizzy felines emerge. Did it work? Hard to say. Oh! Also, the sack costs forty million dollars.

I can understand the reasoning and yet, like many other people, I have to admit a bit of disappointment. E3 was about more than the spectacle, it was like the Super Bowl and Christmas all rolled into one. Of course, it probably cost double what either event did.

One hopes that gaming schedules will even out after a while. I remember when working on projects about three jobs ago that getting something ready to E3 was itself a milestone. No matter what else was going on, you had to have something to show no matter how ready it was. Given the extended development cycles on modern consoles, and the difficulty of getting any project approved with so much cost, I can see why the industry as a whole would want to remove such a stumbling block to getting products out the door.

It used to be that there was feast or famine: lots of stuff around E3 and Christmas, diddly squat for the other ten months of the year. Which is stupid and leads to a lot of games being swept under the rug.

So while I never went to E3, I knew a lot of people who did. I used to get buckets of swag from their trips, too. Somewhere in my desk is a set of Metal Gear Solid dog tags, now that I think of it. The Pod Racer 64 t-shirt long dissolved into nothingness.

Currently listening to the soundtrack to Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. I'm trying to be really good and avoid any and all spoilers for the upcoming season. All I've heard is that it will be "darker than anything we've done before."

This from the show that produced Lay Down Your Burdens. At this rate every viewer is going to require extensive therapy or massive doses of Cute Overload just to get through the day.

Global warming? What global warming?

Spent the weekend in San Francisco for a wedding and to beat the 100 degree weather in Stumptown.

This plan backfired when it was hotter in SF on Saturday than it was at home. Still, it was a pretty good trip, even if there was almost more driving than actual visiting.

I did discover something most excellent--Michael J. Nelson has a new project called RiffTrax. Take a movie, download his commentary track, and then watch a sort-of MST3K experience. The best part, of course, is that they don't have to license the movie and this allows them to create commentary tracks for pretty much anything.

The current selection is Roadhouse, which I think I've seen perhaps ten minutes of. However, it's now rocketed to the top of my NetFlix queue. Next on the list is The Fifth Element, which is a big shiny dumb movie that is just crying out for... something. I liked it, but I wanted to like it much more. You can vote on the next project, too.

Currently reading new books by both Vernor Vinge (Rainbows End) and Alastair Reynolds (Pushing Ice). Oh yeah, and Karl Schroeder's new book Lady of Mazes has been fairly enjoyable so far.

Nerd Prom

I am not at San Diego Comic-con, but other people are:

• Latest Flickr photos


• Live feed from the Dumbrella booth


• Comic-Con homepage

It's going to be 100+ here in Stumptown for the next three days. I am going to California but for other reasons.

I wonder if the other people in the car would mind listening to Kylie's album Fever on continuous repeat for the entire trip...

Why try harder

(Title courtesy of the Fatboy Slim compilation I bought on my lunch hour today.)

While I was walking the far-too-trendy mall thingy today, I was again reminded about how awesome this image from Peet's looks:

There's just something about this product photo that I really like. Whether it's the shaved chocolate, the condensation on the glass, or something else, I cannot say. It's very well done.

Signed up for an iStockphoto account earlier this week, if only for the access to artists and photographers far more talented than I will ever be. It's cheaper and less frustrating to find something cool online than be confronted with my poor hand and general lack of drawing tablets at work.

Though really, I'm not sure they want a user interface that looks like it's for Teen Girl Squad. (Which is new this week, by the way...)


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(OK, it is probably more fun if you hear that in Strong Bad's voice.)

Allow me to say, "Poppycock"

One of my favorite comics of 2002 was the Amazing Screw-On Head by Mike Mignola. It had everything young minds need to grow and develop: secret histories of the world, zombie emperors, vampires, cyborgs, etc.

The Sci-Fi Channel, bless their little hearts, has taken this and made it into an animated series, and you can watch the pilot online.

It's a beautiful piece of work. The story from the SA forums is that the Sci-Fi Channel is on the fence about the show, there are four episodes in the bag, but they're not sure it will work.

Take a gander. It may be the best 23 minutes you spend this week, unless you happened to TiVo the Venture Brothers from Sunday.

Searches, statistics, and crushing writer's block

I've been trying to balance life and work, with mixed success as of late. My own creative output has gone way down as workload has increased. Of course, I did spend an hour trying to create a humorous picture of one of my coworkers in Photoshop, so that's creativity of a different sort.

Interests wax and wane as summer progresses. Early on, I was all about the Maple Story. Then there was the enjoyable week or two I spent replaying both the Arm and Core campaigns of Total Annihilation. For a while I was playing a lot of StarCraft. Then it was reading.

Currently trying to play through games in my Gamefly queue—I had one or two games out for almost 8 weeks, still sitting in their packaging. One of them got maybe a half hour of playtime before I decided it wasn't for me.

Senator Ted "Comedy Goldmine" Stevens wants you to know: The internet is full of tubes. It's not a big truck.

Why do I pay for cable again?

Oh yeah, it's so that I can watch the Venture Brothers on a big screen. That and Univision's soccer coverage. And COPS. (I tend to watch that when I'm online since it doesn't require much thought and it's the TV equivalent of going to a convention for me--at the end I feel like my life is kinda normal.)

TV got another nail in the coffin with the upcoming release of Brisco County Jr on DVD. (Though wow, that site does open 3 pop-up windows and is extraordinarily loud, so maybe try looking on Amazon instead.

I'm not sure I really like this trend of releasing whole seasons on DVD for $100. That's a pretty high price point, at least to me. The Doctor Who set (season 27 with Christopher Eccleston) is about the same, but it does come with a ton of extras. On the other hand, compared to the highway robbery that is Farscape, that's not that bad.