Plaidophile

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Aw man, I wouldn't have had to move if I'd gotten a job at I Can Has Cheezburger. Of course I'd have had to have gone back in time and become a .NET developer as soon as .NET 1.0SP3 came out, but hey.

(Seriously, why the hell does a site with pictures of captioned animals need such a high-spec engineer? 3+ years of .NET, 3+ years of AJAX? Not that I'd have minded working in Lower Queen Anne, if only for the colorful surroundings, but what the hell.)

Tonight, I went with a large subset of the Spud-centric Seattle gang to see a well-known saxophonist (Lonnie Williams - you'd never think he was fairly well-known in certain circles for how little there is about him online... hell, the venue he was at doesn't even list him on the events page, wtf?) who's been a friend-of-a-friend-of-Spud for years, as well as his ensemble. While I was chatting with friends, Lonnie came over to say hi and basically do a pre-show meet-and-greet (though he specifically knew most of the people at the table).

He asked me if I played keys, and I said, "A little," and he said, "Why don't you come up on stage later and play with us?" I thought he was joking and said, "Sure!"

And towards the end of the set, he started to gesture at me, and I was all, "Really?" and he was all, "Really!" and I went up on stage and jammed. And apparently I did good!

This isn't even an isolated incident. I guess something about me says, "This person is willing to improvise." (Though this was the first time it didn't involve freejazz, and didn't involve me even being remotely prepared for it.)

The thing I was working on at Amazon is finally available. Go buy one. Or don't.

(Oh wow, it looks like they've cleaned up the on-screen UI a lot since I left.)

(Though I really need to ignore the customer forums. Ugh.)

Okay, I learned that Pixelmator will have tablet support VERY SOON (on their Twitter page they announced that they finished implementing it about 11 hours ago, so of course the next release will really have it like they sorta-promised on their forums). So I decided to give it another shot, bearing in mind that tablet support would be coming.

It's pretty close to decent, though I still have a few complaints with it. Nothing that'll prevent me from buying it when 1.1 comes out, but there are many things I'd like to see them fix in the (preferably near) future:

So, for the last several years I've been using Photoshop 7 to draw my comics. Unfortunately, I've read that Photoshop 7 doesn't run under OSX 10.5 (which I really want to upgrade to), but I'm not going to spend the $oodles to upgrade to CS3 (the price seems to go up every week... it's $1000 now!). I'm having a hell of a time finding a drawing app which fits my needs without being an expensive high-end photo-editing suite, though. And yes, I've tried a lot of them.

I just saw Stranger Than Fiction, which was the best movie I've seen in a long time. While the trailers made it seem like an interesting, quirky, romatic comedy, the actual movie was way better than I could have imagined. There's some pretty good literary themes in it and there's a certain beautiful irony to the way it ends up affecting itself.

Also notable is that it's probably the first movie I've seen which actually does need Blu-Ray to come across very well, because of all the little fiddly details which would have been lost on DVD. The main character has a fairly interesting form of synaesthesia, and the way it's conveyed is very well-done. Sure, it'd have been visible on DVD, but the details would have gone away (watching the "making of" segments, which are encoded at DVD quality, confirms this - eye-strain city!).

There is no longer any excuse for me to not visit people who aren't in the 1 square mile section of town I see on a daily basis.

into the volcano

This is the most addictive platformer I've ever played. Holy cow. It's also pretty funny, and the voice acting is great, and the graphics are amazing (the only I you can really tell the difference between the realtime game engine and the FMVs is the FMVs have a lower framerate and a little bit of visible artifacting, though some of the lighting/fur/etc. effects are a bit better in the FMVs too). The difficulty level seems to be just right for me, and the storyline is pretty interesting even though I never got through the original Ratchet and Clank (and never played any of the sequels).

Some of the non-mainline gameplay bits are a bit fiddly and obnoxious (like, the Starfox-esque rails-shooter segments could be a bit better), but so far I'm very impressed with this game. I totally recommend getting it, and a PS3 to play it on if you don't already have one. (Which you probably don't.)