John Zeitler

Honestly, today was the first opportunity I’ve had in a very long time to sit down and do up a blog post. Then I managed to contract terminal writer’s block and have nothing of any substance or value to provide to you folks. I apologize.

If I get the chance and the motivation to do so this weekend I’ll set aside an hour or so and give folks the rundown on how things have been progressing. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out a way to integrate Tumblr into my content-generation routines, and coming up kind of short. What I have put up today, though, should go a long way towards alleviating my disquiet.

I have a lot to get caught up on here on the blog… Beyond Madness & Genius prime among them. There’s also the extreme flu I’ve had for the past two weeks, the coming start of the 2011 convention season (and it opens with a bang, let me tell you that), the announcement (and subsequent release, and further subsequent coveting by me) of the iPad 2, complaints about the bus schedule shakeup, rants about games and food, and just a general load of life stuff that needs to be addressed. With any luck this weekend I should have the presence of mind to get to it all.

But first, a complaint and and advisory. Most of you know I’m a rabid Pokemaniac, and when the fifth-generation games (Pokemon Black and White) were released last week I was all over them. I discovered, however, an interesting “freezing” phenomenon. When using the game’s instant-start communications tool, the C-Gear, starting it up in the field caused the game to mysteriously stop accepting button inputs. The game appeared to be communicating– the wi-fi light started flickering– but the screen didn’t respond at all. I just now learned through some forum posts that the only way to proceed was to touch the touch screen– which at no point are you prompted to do, in a bizarre break from Nintendo’s usually rigorous standards of always telling you exactly the next step. This isn’t just a bad oversight, this is an outright atrocious design flaw that should have been addressed weeks before the game hit North America.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the rest of the game, and I’m still of the opinion that this could have been the greatest Pokemon game to date. But given that issue, and the other things introduced in HeartGold and SoulSilver that are oddly missing here, that title is still firmly in the hands of 2010′s remake set.

Ciao, folks– hopefully I’ll get to you guys tomorrow instead of next month.

Yeah, I missed a day. Not on purpose, I can assure you. Plus, the previous two days have been kind of terse. Maybe I ought to start there and explain a little.

Some of the weirdness that’s been going on these past two or three weeks has not stemmed from the move, but from the fact that at work, we’ve been wrapping up a release candidate. Friday was the last day for that, and as a result I ran into a situation where I needed to make a 30-mile trip into the unknown on Saturday morning in order to deal with some of the fallout. I had literally no idea where I was going, and if I hadn’t got there before noon, the goal would cease to exist. Fortunately, a) I had the GPS unit, and b) I woke up at 5a anyway and got there at 10a. So my store of adrenaline was pretty well gone by noon. My car wasn’t damaged or anything; the trip was smooth, though there was a small detour.

So that brings me to yesterday afternoon, the first point since… oh, July, where I had the weekend to myself and no major obligations left. I did a little bit of cleaning up, but the majority of the day was spent right where I am now– on the couch. Unfortunately, you know what they say about inertia, and around 9p I was asleep. I woke up at 11p to get a blanket from the bed but other than that I was done. (Sue me, the couch was already warm and the bed was not.)

Today, really, should be more of the same; I’ve got to take a quick run out to get groceries for the coming week or so, and later on a friend or two will be over to help test out Rock Band 3 in local multiplayer. Because if there’s one thing that I really want to do today, it’s rock.

So, I suppose, that means I’m going away. I hope you don’t mind. But, for tomorrow’s post, I promise you, I’ll be back in time.

………….all this has been a really convoluted excuse for saying that I also watched the Back to the Future Trilogy yesterday.

I missed being able to post for today, primarily because I was filming footage for the Life in One Day project. As it turns out yesterday was profoundly boring, and I’m not even sure I’ll submit any of my video for the project… but it did serve its purpose in getting me a little more practice with the video camera in advance of Otakon. I also wrapped up the essays needed for Essay Week, so without further delay, I’ll be posting the first one… now.

Work is heating up. By heating up I mean I’ll be lucky to sleep in the next week and a half. I’ve already had to cancel every single leisure or side-project activity I had planned, and it’s still not enough. So I have to put the posts on hiatus for the time being. I don’t even have enough time tonight to get Bailout together for the next two weeks. No further information is available. Deal with it, because I have to.

It’s a universally known fact that if I decide I want to write up a long post on a current-event topic, the only time that I’ll have to write said post is long after it’s relevant or even timely. So I’m saving the Lost post for an upcoming, to-be-scheduled Essay Week and calling it a night.

I make no promises as to the content of a post for tomorrow, save that there will be one.

Another long day today, folks, but tomorrow I should be back into my normal schedule. That long post about Lost and TV sci-fi will come then.

So last night’s little soiree with Split/Second (also known as Concerto for Eight Automobiles, With Explosive Accompaniment) was notable, to me at any rate, for two reasons. The first was that, obviously, I managed to reach the long-hovered-over 15K mark for my Gamerscore. The second, though, was that it was a minor little brush with fame. See, Robert Bowling, the community director at Infinity Ward, is a well-known figure– he was just on Major Nelson’s podcast, and given the high-profile status of the Call of Duty games, he’s been in the public eye a bit recently, particularly in regards to Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer. So imagine my great surprise when I happened to stumble upon him in a random matchmaking lobby.

Yeah, he blew me up. Repeatedly, I might add. I think I got him good maybe once. But I managed to lose two races in a row. Not just lose, but come in dead last. The closest I’ve come to gaming with a quasi-celebrity, and I blew it badly.

Oh, you bet I still tweeted about it, and I’m still excited that I even had the opportunity (there’s, what, two zillion Xbox Live players out there? the odds were flagrantly against me ever seeing his gamertag, let alone playing against him). But, as far as introductions go, I kinda wish things had gone differently.

Incidentally, and I say this now with more conviction than ever, you want to play Split/Second. I mean it.

….I needed to rest today, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

….I hate the fact that I had a missed post yesterday, but not nearly as much as the fact that I don’t have anything worth talking about tonight, either. With any luck I’ll get some rest and have a real post tomorrow night… assuming I don’t lose track of time with Steam for the Mac (and assuming Valve actually delivers on their “buy-once-play-anywhere” plan which I still adamantly believe is a blatant lie).