News and some thoughts

This is really turning out to be an amazing year. While there has been a fair share of bad (my Grandmother passing away in March), so many things in my life are rapidly changing for the better. It feels like so many parts that were once scattered everywhere are finally starting to click into place.

I’m done with classes and finishing up my internship this summer. So, in all reality, I’m done with college. It’s a weird thought, knowing I’ll never have to take another class or anything like that. My internship is quite easy, so there’s no worries there either; it’s web work in my spare time, although a good amount of it.

Not to sound morbid, but I also got my grandparent’s car, a 1998 Cadillac Deville with 16,000 miles. For some reason, I really love that car. It reminds me of them, has a great feel to it, the whole 300hp is nice too, but its feature loaded. Every car I’ve had has had it’s share of problems (and high miles). The DeVille has power everything, fab, and a leather interior. That whole car accident thing in April (my first) sucked, but with it not being my fault and the car coming out of the body shop looking better than before, I can’t complain.

Evan came to visit in May, which was tons of fun. Eye of Judgment and GTA4 was played to great amounts. We worked on MMOJO, and just had a lot of fun. I hope we can get together again over the summer.

I guess the biggest thing is the job I got. For now I won’t say who it’s with (if you know me, you already know who), since I’m not sure what I’ve signed/will sign, but I finally have my foot in the Video Game Industry. It’s such a weird notion. I’ve known all my life that I wanted to make games; I’ve never questioned that. They’ve been at the forefront of my life, and most of my greatest memories can be tied one way or another into them.  And I went to school to do this, so I don’t know why I feel so surprised and amazed by this. But I do, I’ve taken a big step I guess. It’s one thing to dream about doing something, it’s another to finally do it.

I’d also like to post here more. I know I say that a lot, but there’s so much going on, and I’ve got a lot to talk about. Hopefully I can do something about that.

Oh, and I got a free 12 inch Powerbook G4. I really love this damn little thing. It’s so small, convenient, and the keyboard on it is absolutely stellar. It’s a complete pleasure to type on. It may not be too fast, but for browsing and blogging it’s a dream!

A quick realization

I’ll post more on this later, simply because if I don’t vent I’ll go mad. But for now, I’ve learned that it takes exactly 10 months to discover who your friends really are(n’t). A good judge of character goes a long way.

Plans for the Summer

Summer is rapidly approaching. I’m all but done with school, which is exciting. I just have to get through my internship this summer (which won’t be an issue) and I’ll finally graduate with my bachelors. Exciting.

But there’s a lot more I want to get done this summer. As a reminder to myself, and in hopes of keeping me on task, I list the following:

• Get MMOJO.net going again as an MMO ranting / hypothesizing site; news is too much of a pain to cover and I think has officially been Done To Death ™
• Take more photos. I bought a nice Canon digital camera earlier this year, and have access to our Nikon DSLR. I love photography, I just never "get to it." With the awesomeness that is Smugmug, I’d really like to start shooting more.
• Get Gamephrase back on track; same format, but push the others to publish articles more. Maybe bring in new blood too. Also, I need to get the podcast going regularly.
• BST to 75 in FFXI. It’s a lofty goal, but I think I can pull it off. Especially if someone duos with me.
• Work on my AppleTV, filling it with media (read: anime).
• GTA4
• Work on putting Project Blackvale into a Neverwinter Nights 2 Module. It kills me having all this material sitting around and never doing anything with it.
• Start working on my idea for a point and click adventure game in AGS.
• Jonathan Coulton with Reid, Steph, and Ebby!
• Play Age of Conan and watch it be terrible.
• Finish my internship and make a lot of money on that.
• Finally beat the last level of Ratchet and Clank FToD.
• Beat MGS4.
• FINAL FANTASY TACTICS ADVANCE 2 OMG.
• Mess around with XNA more; read through the book I got and see if I can prototype my FFT style multiplayer game.

Lofty goals? Yes! But hopefully I’ll finish them all. There’s a lot of stuff to do there, but I’ll also have a lot of free time this summer, and things are fairly comfortable in my life right now.

So what are your plans for the summer? Oh, and keep me on track!

SmugMug

I recently decided to make the jump off of Flickr and onto SmugMug after reading Leo Laporte’s praise for the service and being wooed by they’re independent nature and deep support of open-source and especially Firefox. So far I’m really happy with the service, and saving half off the yearly price by jumping ship from Flickr helped too!

It’s not that I wasn’t happy with Flickr, it’s just Flickr doesn’t feel like it’s built as much around really showing off Photography, but instead showing off random images from your life in a short, concise way; Which is fine, but not what I’m looking for.  The change of MS buying Yahoo, and thus owning Flickr wasn’t anything I worried about. Microsoft has nothing that even touches Flickr, so they’d be sure to leave the service relatively untouched; and MS is a big enough company that burning a large group of consumers isn’t in their best interest. But I also really dislike Microsoft, and the prospect of having my photos hosted by them wasn’t something I’d be thrilled with, not to mention paying them $25 to do so. I’d rather support a company driving innovation, supporting open source software, and well.. not a bunch of copy cats.

Anyhow, you can check out my SmugMug here: http://jimweinhart.smugmug.com/ - If you’re interested in signing up and want to use me as a referral, feel free to use my referal coupon: dyhbzwxFOpQNE

If you use SmugMug, let me know what you love about the service! I’m really hoping Evan Sims picks up an account and starts messing with the API; it looks like he could do quite a lot with it!

My post on Shack RE: Earth Hour (lol)

RE: Will you be participating in Earth Day-

hahaha yea right. as much as i’d hate to miss out on a hippy handjob party where a bunch of people do a frivolous act and believe they’ve actually made a difference while stroking each other’s ego, i’ll pass. A great look at “earth hour” http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/earthers_burn/

This environmental fad with our age group kills me. Everyone wants to make it a cause to wear on their shirt and talk about how superior they are over those who “don’t get it”, but when it comes time to actually do something, they’re too busy romanticizing the issue and putting the attention on them, or worrying about what the highly publicized cause will be this week, and attacking those who aren’t so quick to jump on the unsubstantiated bandwagon.

I’m just a realist when it comes to shit like this. I’m not worried about preaching the cause of global warming or cooling, because we’ve been down this road before; to assume we completely understand the earth and its millions of years of climate and weather patterns is simply ridiculous.

But what I do believe is that we shouldn’t just dump chemicals into water bodies, ever. How do I know? Watch what it directly does to the environment and its inhabitants, and if a human were to drink it. I also know we shouldn’t dump harmful chemicals into the atmosphere that we can’t breathe ourselves; cause it turns out w actually breathe oxygen,weird shit!

And we shouldn’t go and kill off species of animals; it’s horrible, irresponsible, and they’re irreplaceable. We shouldn’t dump trash openly into the environment, cause it’s obviously not supposed to be there; it subtracts from the natural beauty of nature and creates harmful situations for many other inhabitants. Oh, and if a business cuts down a tree, they should be forced to REPLACE it , because trees are a renewable resource, and we’d be stupid to put ourselves in a place where we don’t have that.

I don’t need a stupid day to make me feel like i’m making a change, or I’m so special for being “in the know” on the next big fad. Common sense shows us that actually making changes like above on a day to day basis will have a much larger and profound benefit to the planet; and that’s entirely provable without need for debate. And hell, in reality, shutting everything down for an hour and bringing everything back up really probably cancels itself out in the long run based on the efficiency of electronics, especially on startup.

A rant on society

Earlier tonight I got into an argument with my father, one we have quite often. We were watching a television show and I was being critical of a few people. This is something that always bugs him; I come off as a negative person… I realize this. I’m critical of people for varying reasons I’ll describe shortly. Regardless of this, he goes off on his Dr. Phil inspired rant, assuming since he watched a hack on TV, he understands how people work. He tells me the reason I’m critical of people is because I have low self-esteem, so I have to put down everyone else. Well, I’d like to start off by saying if this is true, I know a LOT of people with self-esteem issues, starting with every comic on the face of the earth. We all know it can be funny to “poke” people; is it always nice? No. But depending on how the joke is presented, and the thickness of both the joker and jokee’s skins, there isn’t really a problem.

I’m quite aware of my current state of “esteem.” As a person, I’m extremely confident of myself. I don’t hate myself, or demonize over any portion of my life. Obviously there are things I’d change; everyone has them. But it doesn’t make me dislike myself; in all reality, I’m quite a fan of who I am. In school I was always popular; a class clown, never a problem making friends, regardless of the comfort level of the situation. I’m also not jealous of anyone; I don’t see people on TV living these fairy tale lives and think to myself, “Hey, I want some of that!” I am who I am, and I’m proud of that.

The reason I can be extremely negative and critical of people is a set of core values I have. I’m not exactly sure where they came from; I’d like to say its a mix of my experiences growing up, watching how other people’s choices directly affected the quality of their lives. Not to mention being thrust into a Christian school during high school and watching the nut-jobbery there. These values I have are important to me, regardless of their source; and they’re quite simple; I’m not religious (if anything I look down on religion as a crutch for the weak, but that’s another topic), but I believe in morals. Living a “good” life; making decisions that benefit both my current and future self. I reflect on the things I do an decisions I made frequently; questioning whether I’d be proud of them, how they’ll affect me in the future, and what I’d think of them at that point. I want to be a good person and live a life with no regrets.

There’s more to this “belief” of mine. For example, I really hate smoking and drugs. It’s not cause someone said “Hey, drugs are bad” when I was young and it stuck with me; I’ve watched what they can do to friends, and how far they can take you. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but these are substances you take into your body for meaningless purposes; whether it be for vanity (usually smoking), or to disconnect yourself from your own life (drugs). You’re harming yourself for nothing. Coming to this conclusion just seemed obvious; for example, look at parents. They don’t want their children doing drugs, smoking, etc. It’s fairly universal that this is the case; doesn’t anyone wonder why? There’s something almost innate about purity and goodness, and its normal to want that for those whom you love. Obviously everyone makes mistakes, and we learn from them, and I have no problems with people who have made such mistakes and moved on. But to try and justify stupid things like this just baffles me; you’re harming your body and/or your life for something so meaningless.

And the harming your life part is important. Earlier, I mentioned I’m not religious, yet I have these values. It seems like morals unfortunately go hand in hand with religion; if a “God” isn’t telling you to be good, why would you? That’s a stupid idea, and one I’m proud to move past. What I do believe is that I’ve been given a life. It’s a finite life, but one of almost infinite possibilities. Because I only have this one life, that I’m aware of, I feel its my duty to make the most of it; to be happy, take in knowledge, and make my mark as little or as big as that may be. I make mistakes, but I always have that goal in mind; to live my life in a way that’s worthy of what it is; now my objection to harmful substances should be a bit more clear; they definitely hamper this goal, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually.

This is a belief that’s so clear to me; it makes logical sense, and it just feels right; there’s something to that. I don’t push this on anyone; while I get angry watching people throw their lives away, or go as far as to interfere and hurt others, I never try to instruct or lash out at them. But like I said, I do get angry. Part of living a “good” life in my eyes is being yourself. Being a unique person that’s internally happy. That knows who they are and doesn’t feel like they have to live up to any other person’s expectations other than their own. Watching people mimic other people to fit in, or change who they are because they think they’ll be happy as someone else just destroys me. There’s nothing scary about being yourself; if more people would try it, I think we’d all be in a better place. Just like smoking tends to be about vanity (fitting in, looking “cool”), you’re hurting yourself AND destroying who you truly are. I really hate watching people I care about become less of themselves.

And that really sums my point up; living your life and being true to yourself. We’ve all got one chance at this, why jeopardize it? We’ll all make mistakes; learn from them, it’ll only help your life. Teach others of your mistakes so they can avoid similar pitfalls. Look at the decisions you make and think about how they’ll affect you in the future, and what your future self is likely to think (A great example of this are Tattoo’s. Everyone my age wants to permanently etch things into their body that is representative of who they are now; generally superficial, meaningless things that only a young person would care about. Fast forward ten years they have this pointless mark on their body that they’re paying thousands of dollars to be turned into a scar. There’s a reason why Tattoo removal is such a fast growing, money making field; I’m looking at you Matt .. but I digress). It’s OK to be angry at the decisions other people make; there’s no point in forcing something like this on them, they have to find their peace themselves. I just can’t help getting a little upset when I see it happen though (especially close friends)… Nobody is perfect though, and even if they’re making mistakes (in regards to my philosophy), there’s no reason to hold it against them, as long as they are themselves. It’s something I struggle with, but good friendships are worth it; sometimes we have to look past even our strongest beliefs in the name of great friendship.

Anyhow, I guess that’s my rant. If anything it’s a look into how I see the world and life. This isn’t meant to offend anyone, I just felt like I had to get it out in writing; to organize my belief into some coherent record and explain myself in light of my father’s criticism. I realize what I believe may not work for everyone, so if this upsets you, don’t let it. Like I mentioned earlier, I don’t want to push my beliefs on anyone; we all have to find our way, find an inner peace. Let me also say, nothing here was directed at anyone (except the jab at my brother :P); the only thing that inspired this post was the argument with my father; I have plenty of friends who smoke, drink, and do other things I don’t care for, and that’s their business; I don’t think I’ve ever hidden to them that I don’t like those things, so nothing should be of surprise here. Oh, and if you do smoke, please quit, it’s pointless and bad for you, and you’ll totally regret it later in life! I love you all and just want the best for the people I care about
Updated: Fixed a few grammar/spelling errors; dyslexia and late night writing for the win

Oh yea!

One last thing… One other thing I’d like to use this site for is a sort of personal work journal; ie projects I’m working on, ideas to jot down, etc. I figure it might be interesting to other people and at the same time it should keep me on task.

I’m not dead!

Wow, so I really dropped the ball here. It happens… Luckily I have an excuse; for the past couple of months, a few of us have been working on getting Gamephrase.com off the ground as a Gaming Blog/Podcast. We did a couple test episodes of the podcast and received some great feedback; notably that our content was great, but we need to do something about the audio quality.

I’m not exactly sure what to do there though. I suppose we could all record it in person sans Cory, since she’s the only one who isn’t local here. We could use Skype, but without her having a decent headset, the quality takes a nose dive pretty fast. By doing it all local, I’m afforded much better quality, and a lot easier editing. I don’t want to do that though since she brings an interesting perspective to the conversation (especially since the show is two other guys). I’ll think of something; we could always take up a collection for another headset!
Like I mentioned, apparently our content is working; going through the different news stories that strike us as interesting and covering any newly posted articles to the site. I’m sure as time goes by we’ll play with the format a bit, but we’re off to a good start there.

I think the hardest problem is just going to be getting content up there. I’m not really sure how to solve that; I know we have to increase the team size a bit.. I was initially reluctant to do that for a few reasons, such as the splitting of advertising profits, content management, etc. It seems as though the positives outweigh the negatives though; and while the site does drive a pretty impressive amount of traffic once the podcast goes up, I doubt advertising revenue is something to worry about for now.

Another issue though is the actual focus of the site. Reid, Cory, and I are primarily console gamers, or at least came from that background. However, I’d like to start posting more about MMOs and PC Games; I think keeping the site purely grounded in Console land diminishes the overall goals we have and does a disservice to PC gaming.

If anyone has any recommendations for me, let me know. If you haven’t checked out the site, please do so.

I’ll try to post here more often. I’ve struggled a bit with what to publish here and what to publish on Gamephrase. I suppose this will turn into more of a behind the scenes deal and a focus on more personal topics, and all my gaming exploits will fall on Gamephrase!

Wanted Dead or Alive

So today Evan, Reid, Nacho and I went to Best Buy on the rumor they had Rock Band demo units. Luckily this turned out to be true, and much rocking out was had. The game just feels so right (well, the Guitar and Drums at least, all that was hooked up). Going in I was expecting something quite amazing (I have been saying this is my most anticipated release of 07), but somehow it was even better than that.

The Guitar feels so much better than any of the previous GH models. While GH3’s guitar was a step in the right direction, it still felt rather toyish. Rock Band’s Strat feels quite real, has great action, and I’m so in love with that strum bar.

My favorite though (and no surprise) was the drum kit. It really does feel like you’re playing the drums. I had a really easy time getting into songs and feeling it out; I jumped right into Medium and was already passing songs without a problem.

I really can’t wait for November 20th.. it was already pretty tough, but now it so much worse.

Oh yea, and this thing next to GH3 was just laughable.

shinikaru

Today is Wednesday. Did you know that? Today should be an amazing day; Ratchet and Clank and Eye of Judgment are released today.

Oh wait, not any more. Instead only Ratchet and Clank comes out today; which is all sorts of swell, except that Eye of Judgment does not. Rather, it has been delayed and now comes out Thursday.. happiness is forced to elude me another day.

Did you know that Wednesday and Thursday are now a bifecta of power? A unifecta would have been better, and of course a trifecta the best, but I’ll take what I can get.

This overly incoherent, possibly emo post has been brought to you by 3:30AM, 12 hours better than 3:30PM. Except on Sundays. And Super Sundays.