I met Dan Aykroyd

Published on May 27, 2010 in Geek. View Comments

Three years ago I met Ernie Hudson. I got a photo of all four Ghostbusters and he signed it. I have made it a goal to get all four guys to sign it now.

Tonight I was chillin’ at home in a Battlegrounds queue when my phone rang. It was my friend Robert. He’d just passed a liquor store with an Ecto-1 parked outside. Dan Aykroyd was inside, selling and signing bottles of Crystal Head Vodka. “I would leave, like, now,” he advised. I checked the website — it was legit and going until 8pm. It was 7:30. “Can you get in your uniform that fast?” asked Kat. “Of course I can — I’m a Ghostbuster!” And I am not kidding — I said it with a straight face and no sense of the ridiculous nature dawned on me. I meant it. In retrospect, I am a little scared for myself.

We grabbed the photo. We grabbed my wallet. We found Kat’s wallet. We figured out how to get there — it was ten minutes away, which in LA is potentially 40 minutes, but we showed up just in time. Ecto-1 outside. Signs everywhere. My pack broke; I had to do emergency surgery. The guys at the store were waving me in from across the street, saying “C’mon! You’re gonna be the last one, but you gotta get in here!”

Photo? Wallet? At home. Didn’t grab them after all. But Kat had her Nikon.

Dan Aykroyd is one of the reasons I love comedy. His sense for the absurd, his fearlessness — you watch those early SNLs and it’s amazing. Sneakers, Grosse Pointe Blank,Dragnet…and oh yeah, he created Ghostbusters. Ray has always been my favorite character — the smart believer, the relentlessly positive one, “the heart of the Ghostbusters.”  I built ecto goggles to go with the outfit because Ray had them.

I bought a bottle of the vodka for him to sign, of course.

It says “Dan — Report all ghosts! Dan Aykroyd — ‘Ray’”

I posed for a few photos with the Ecto-1 and a few people who wanted their photo taken with me, and then we headed home.

Two down, two to go. Well, I did get to interview Harold Ramis when I was at OXM, so I suppose that counts for something. I have now made contact with three GBs, even if I only have one signature on that darn photo.

Now excuse me, I have to drink booze from a skull.

New Palette-Swap Ninja song: “Arcade Gaming Shrine”

Published on April 30, 2010 in Games, Geek, Music and Palette-Swap Ninja. View Comments

Only took, like, 11 months to do my half of this song but it’s finally available. It’s an ode to the coin-ops Jude and I grew up with (and that he has since adopted for his basement arcade — it’s basically a song about him).

Palette-Swap Ninja – “Arcade Gaming Shrine”

Zazzle, round two

Published on April 14, 2010 in Etc. View Comments

This time they told me I don’t own something I created.

Please envision this FUCK YOU in much larger letters, possibly blinking.

I am blogging

Published on February 25, 2010 in Etc and Geek. View Comments

Just not here so much at the moment. I am mixing business and pleasure over at OneOfSwords. So if you’re not reading that…read that. :)

Radio Free Amrich

Published on January 24, 2010 in Etc, Geek and Music. View Comments

LA is nice but we miss our old morning radio show from SF. The LA DJs are all aging fratboys making fart jokes and talking about sports and Elvis. I miss the sardonic whinings of Sarah & Vinnie. Kat found the Squeezebox and suggested we use that as our alarm clock — a fine substitute for the ancient one I’ve been carrying with me since college. It has a cassette player in it, so you can wake to a tape. That’s how old it is. But the new jam? Shiny and red. I love red consumer electronics. They’re so…not black.

So we got one and I realized, hey, this thing streams from either the internet or your home network — install server software on as many PCs or Macs as you like, and the Squeezebox seeks them out, even prioritizing iTunes so you can use the same playlists. We can use this to listen to our “bedtime stories” — old radio dramas that we’ve burned to MP3 CDs and run off a boombox with a sleep timer. And we’ve got this Mac Mini that’s just sitting on the network as a poor-man’s NAS box for data; why not load it up with a big iTunes library of old-time radio MP3s and do that? That will make things simple…right?

Continue reading ‘Radio Free Amrich’

My Activision site is live

Published on January 19, 2010 in Etc and Games. View Comments

Go check out OneOfSwords and it will make me happy. Kat designed the site and I think she did a great job. Poke around; you’ll see the origin of the name in the About section.

And if you follow OneOfSwords on Twitter by this Friday, you’re eligible to win some cool prizes. What good is working at a big games publisher if you can’t give out some swag?

Please tell every living creature you know. If telling people about this promotional event is a point of introduction for you to meet new living creatures, all the better.

Week 1 and the challenges ahead

Published on January 9, 2010 in Etc. View Comments

I started at Activision this week. Could barely sleep Sunday night; Monday was the first day of school. It’s really cool to go to a job where you do not have the typical “new guy” vibe — I have already worked with some of my new co-workers for 15 years. The only thing different is that I no work 15 feet away in another cubicle. Continue reading ‘Week 1 and the challenges ahead’

Dan vs. Zazzle (or, The Curious Case of Schroedinger’s Calendar)

Published on January 3, 2010 in Etc, Geek and Guitar. View Comments

Zazzle, I always liked you. You saw what a lousy job CafePress was doing with on-demand one-off publishing, like hats and mugs and shirts, and said, “Hell, we can do that, and we can do it better.” So you took their business plan and ran with it and it was good (and it led to copyrighted banner images like the above, which are the exclusive property of Zazzle and not me). Besides, I like supporting San Francisco businesses, even if they don’t have original ideas.
Continue reading ‘Dan vs. Zazzle (or, The Curious Case of Schroedinger’s Calendar)’

2010 Resolutions

Published on January 1, 2010 in Etc and WoW. View Comments

For years I’ve sworn off of New Year’s resolutions. I always felt it was a way to set myself up to fail. But for some reason, this year, I have a few.

  • Lose some weight. My new job will put me more in the public eye; I’ll be doing more videos than before. I’m in an area of the country where image is more important than, well, anything. I want my clothes to fit better. I will have less problems with gout. I have a lot of reasons to work out more and eat less. (I do not intend to stop eating what I like, but I can make positive change through portion control and diversifying what I put on my plate.)
  • Get to level 80. Kimzey is 76 and has been scraping forward slowly, being “my main” but taking a back seat to both my death knight and my healer, because I have been running with friends where those characters were more appropriate. I would always rather play with friends than power-level alone, but this year, I want to hit 80 before Cataclysm hits (whenever that is).

    • That’s enough. Achievable goals.

    WoW magazine sample — and a slippery slope

    Published on December 28, 2009 in Games, Geek and WoW. View Comments

    I was very happy to see that the 40-page free sample of the World of Warcraft magazine was posted online at last. It was hard working on that project and not being able to show anybody what was taking so long, but nothing could be displayed until Blizzard had approved it. Now that they have, I figure the files have shipped to the printer and the physical magazine should be winging its way to mailboxes (including mine) by early January. Big props to Ryan Vulk, Josh Augustine, Julian Rignall, and the rest of the Future Plus team for weathering the storm and making it look awesome in the process. I think people who actually pick it up and give it a chance will be very impressed.

    A few sites picked up the story, and as usual, most of the reader comments on those stories were the same tripe I’ve seen over and over again whenever any blog reports on any magazine. In Kotaku’s user comments, Azures said, “The internet makes them pointless on the most basic level. the internet is killing newspapers, im shocked ANY magazine is still around.”

    I was going to post a long response over at Kotaku, but I’ve decided I would rather ramble and look like a crazy person on my own turf.
    Continue reading ‘WoW magazine sample — and a slippery slope’