I'm pretty jet-lagged and frazzled, but I made it. The area that I'm in is really nice, but I still feel like I'm in the "Irish" part of Epcot or something, not the for real Ireland. Once I get into the city (or the country!) more, though, I think it'll kick in. The tasty scone I had for breakfast (as well as the salty, artificial-tasting pork rashers that I tried to work into a pasta dish) couldn't have come from anywhere else.

Fun fact: although the Irish have some incredible writers (and rugby players, apparently), they seem to have conceded defeat when it comes to food. On my Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, my dinner options were chicken cacciatore or ravioli. Even the salad had Italian dressing on it. It's not just Italy, though: how about Captain America's Cookhouse, conveniently located in Dublin? It's weird to go to an exciting foreign country and find that (at least some) people think we're cool.

I'm staying on the outskirts of Dublin, but I'll be heading into the city proper tomorrow. Should be interesting.

Updates might be sporadic because I'm pretty sure I blew out my electrical outlets when I tried to use an adapter to put an American power strip in an Irish socket. There was smoke and a loud pop, which I think means bad things. Anyway, I have to charge my laptop in the kitchen now, so things are going to be tricky until I can get that fixed. ragingime.com 3.0 is well underway, but we'll see whether I have time to finish it soon. More to come! Posted 5/25/2007.

Working on music (also: chiptune!)

New music is in the works, but it's slow going. I had to scrap a good chunk of the track, but after a couple of months, I've gotten a pretty hook together. Now the trick is going to be to figure out how to build up to that part of the song and what I'm going to do on the way. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do for that, but hopefully I'll wind up with a good dancefloor-ready track. It's been too long since I've done one of those.

I've been listening to Trash80's incredibly fun Hologram EP a lot lately. The songs are heavily layered and very danceable - think Basement Jaxx, but with more of a focus on the electronics, particularly flourishes and arpeggios recorded from an old Nintendo. Trash80 manages to work in the simple 8-bit noises in a way that makes them sound downright sexy. 8bitpeoples, the chiptune label that released the record (for free!), has a catalog that can be kind of hit-or-miss, but Hologram is definitely a hit.

When I do 8-bit style sounds, I usually use Tweakbench's Triforce soft synth to mimic NES sounds. It sounds pretty good and less of a hassle than using a Nintendo tracker and hacking the hardware to get clean sound out of it as Trash80 does. I tip my proverbial hat to him. (I can't wear actual hats because I usually look horrible in them.) Also, the guy who made the Dr. Who theme song is awesome.

Okay, I'm off to get some sleep now. Wonderful, wonderful sleep. Posted 5/18/2007.

Destination: Dublin!

Next week, I'm heading off to Ireland for two months. It's a little bit nerve-wracking... I'm living with a bunch of people I don't know in a city I know little about. It'll be an adventure if nothing else, though, and I'm hoping to come back with a cool accent and maybe some scones. I'll let you folks out in blogland know how it goes. Posted 5/18/2007.

The nicest graffiti I've ever seen

I saw this written on a door today. It made me smile.

In other news, I spent a little while getting Wordpress and Gallery set up on my server. Hopefully I can get these integrated into the site so that I can post stuff more easily and use spiffy features like comments and trackbacks and other shiny whatzits. Also, hopefully I can figure out what to do with all the white space that shows up every time I post a picture. Posted 5/7/2007.

Of Mice and (Mega) Men

I seem to have developed this habit of getting into things after they stopped being new and trendy but before they're dated enough to be "old-school." Not only did I not jump on the bandwagon, but the bandwagon left town and made it halfway to China before I even realized that it existed.

First it was cult hits like N, Cave Story, and Every Extend that made their way through a gazillion "free indie games" lists and Radiohead's blog before I tried them. All are excellent, and in particular Cave Story really sucked me in with its old-school but still original design, simple but moving story (with, I think, more than a little allegory about why we really fight), memorable characters, catchy music and incredible, almost obsessive attention to detail. Did I mention that this was made by one guy over the course of like 5 years?

Anyway, my current addiction is Sega's puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket. I think it took, what, seven years after its release date before I finally picked up a copy? It's based on a very simple idea: you place arrows to guide mice away from cats and into rockets. The game starts off easy enough but gets progressively tougher. There's a really insane multiplayer mode where four people (or computer players) are all directing mice into their own rockets. Every twenty seconds or so, a "special" mouse introduces some new twist: suddenly, cats instead of mice are streaming onto the screen. Wait, now the mice are back but there's twice as many. Wait, now everybody's switched positions. Wait, now the mice have turned invisible and you have to guess what you're doing. This goes on for a very frenzied two minutes. If you don't feel like hunting down the Game Boy or Dreamcast versions of the game, Sega produced a free online version of the game that's available here. It's only got one of the four modes of the full game, but it's fun all the same.

I also finally had a listen to Prodigy's 1994 record Music for the Jilted Generation, which is apparently some kind of rave classic. It's no Kraftwerk or anything but it's a lot of fun for what it is. The album isn't deeply moving or anything, but it's full of fun, creative, spazzy rave tracks that don't sound nearly as dated as you'd expect. And if you get sick of music that is intended mainly for dancing, there is an ambitious, trippy, three-track "Narcotic Suite" at the end that seems to predict the whole psytrance/goa movement before the genres were even really founded. Hopefully their upcoming record will have more fun, inventive tracks like this and less of the arena-ready rock crossover stuff that they've been doing since Fat of the Land came out.

I'm still working on the Rockman Nova project... the board seems pretty dead by this point, which I'm assuming is because most people have lost interest or gotten too busy with other stuff. I'm still plugging away, though, and I'm hoping that a flashy new version will be able to attract people back to the project. Hopefully, this one will include a rudimentary level design kit so that it'll be easy for other people to participate. (It's been, what, a year since the last release?) We'll see, I guess. I'm shooting to have this done by the end of the month, because I've got big plans that'll be kicking in a little while after that. I'll post news about that plan in the upcoming weeks. Posted 5/2/2007.