geek cred

Jeremy
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Battlestar-struck

I spent the majority of my time at home last month watching, experiencing the entire run of Battlestar Galactica. I saw the miniseries on January 2nd, and somehow I was able to watch 60+ episodes and a tv movie by the end of the month. I was aided in this by not having my normal weeknight/end commitment of roller derby, but still, that’s a lot of TV in one month. But I don’t regret it, because BSG is fantastic.

Battlestar is definitely as good as everyone told me it would be. The writing is tight and unpretentious; the characters are well-defined and believable; the acting is solid ensemble-wide, and there’s a delicious blend between action, politics, personal relationships and thriller-type suspense plots that makes for a very satisfying show. If that wasn’t enough for me, the creator/writer/mastermind behind it is Ronald Moore, who wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation (during the really good seasons) and penned the movie First Contact, easily two of my favorite sci-fi media ever. This Trek-style moral dilemma writing carries over into a lot of the episodes on BSG, except darker and more tense.

I don’t think you need to like sci-fi to like BSG, but it doesn’t hurt. I feel like, as it goes on, the show reminds me more of Twin Peaks than TNG, with its use of mysticism and visions as means of discovery for the characters. This is actually a good thing, and unlike Peaks, BSG still manages to balance the headier aspects of its plot with a hard, realistic portrayal of the nomadic existence of the Colonial Fleet.

I could go on and on here, but I’ll just leave it at the fact that getting into Battlestar has been totally worth it, and I’m now current with the episodes that are airing, so we may speak about it without fear of spoilers.

Next year’s “watch the whole damn thing at once” show: The Wire.

Jeremy
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Dirty Cheater

I’ve got a pretty long-standing love affair with video games. Although I liked playing them as much as most kids of the 80s, I think I can trace the obsession back to the fall of 1993. I was in sixth grade, and my friend Cliff bought Final Fantasy (the orig) for the NES at a garage sale for like $15. We played it for like ten hours straight – first at his house, and then Cliff coming back to my house to sleep over so we could keep playing. Computer games were a pretty big constant in my house with my programmer brother and former computer salesman father, but when I got the SNES (and later, the Playstation), my obsession exploded. If it was made by Squaresoft and released in America, I probably played and beat it at some point between 1995 and 1999.

This was more or less pre-Internet. Admittedly, I lived in a stronghold of tech nerds, so we had a modem back in 1990, when there was nothing to see, and I think I registered my first Yahoo! mail account in 1996. But when I say pre-Internet, I mean Internet as we know it now, a well-organized resource with thousands of people contributing information for no apparent gain. Which is to say, I beat most, if not all of these games, without consulting some kind of strategy guide or walkthrough. I believe I used to pride myself on the fact that I could make it through these games without resorting to buying the $15 guide most of my friends relied on. I’m pretty sure I considered that cheating. More

Jeremy
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8 bits are all you need

I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the surprisingly robust Little Sound DJ, a composition tool and music tracker for the Nintendo Game Boy. Coming off the musical high of working with the Apple Sisters, I wanted to keep pushing my brain towards musical endeavors. I got seriously inspired watching the chiptune documentary, Reformat the Planet, and I’d thought I’d try my hand at some 8 bit music.

It’s been interesting. The learning curve on LSDJ is not bad for a program on a system with only 8 buttons. It would’ve been wildly unsuccessful as an actual Game Boy game, because you really do need to read the manual and know how to navigate it, etc. What really shocks me though is how broad the functionality of the program is. Considering the Game Boy is a 20 year old piece of techonology, it’s impressive that you can have it run all of this wave synthesis and so forth with surprisingly complex sound.

I nabbed an old school GB off of ebay the other day, so as soon as I feel comfortable enough with it, I’m going to get the necessary equipment to make my own carts and start playing music off of it. My goal is to come up with a few songs and maybe play an open mike night. There’s a popular one down the street from my apt. that I’d like to perform at if I get some material I like. At the moment I’m torn between whether to keep it all on the Game Boy or to play bass under whatever melody/beat combo I come up with. I assume this will resolve itself when I’ve got things a little more fleshed out. Right now my compositions are more “ringtone” than “actual song.”