I can’t keep my eyes off the shiny moving pictures and I can’t concentrate!

The Grillin Fool was my inspiration for cooking again after a long bout of the blahs. You should check him out and his great write-ups!

His recent posts have been about his sniper platoon screening new recruits. He’s been talking about the CrossFit Workout he’s been doing. In his latest post, he describes who/what Fran is.

He also links to a nice YouTube video of this brutal workout.

I’m so glad these guys are on our side.

I’ll be upgrading all our sites at work to WordPress 2.7 before the end of the year, which means I’ll have to retrain some people. But I guess being a web producer is, almost by definition, a job of many hats.

(Posted here for posterity.)

But video games are not a children’s medium any more than animation is. I’ve tried to convince my wife that some of the most emotionally loaded films I have ever seen (Grave of the Fireflies, The Iron Giant, Jin-Roh) are animated, but she still views them as “cartoons.” One of these days I’m going to force myself to sit through Grave of the Fireflies with her and weep like a little girl just to hope it has the same impact on her. I mean, I’ll weep either way, I just hope the movie has the same effect on her.

I’m just glad to see that there are other people who are taking games seriously, even if they aren’t gamers, and that games are getting the critical attention they deserve. I would expect there to eventually be a form of Academy Awards for Games, probably when Gabe Newell retires. I think one of the keys to greater acceptance of gaming as a mainstream form of entertainment lies with the emerging social aspect of games. There was a time when I didn’t play World of Warcraft (oh those sweetly blissful days filled with ignorance of Azeroth’s wealth!) when my coworkers spoke in excited tones of conquest. They pushed the game harder than a crack dealer with kids to feed. “Have some candy little kid…” So I started playing, mostly casually, mostly on my own on a PVE server. And the game was fun, but it wasn’t the life altering methadone I’d been led to believe it was. Then I moved to a PVP server and began playing with some very close friends on a regular basis and the butterfly emerged from its chrysalis. My eyes were opened to the social dynamic of hanging out with friends. We were in a virtual environment, but getting together in meat space isn’t nearly as easy as meeting online.

Melody recently asked for memories of our favorite party. Aside from my wedding reception, my favorite parties have been the Rock Band parties that have been a regular occurrence in the last year. Rock Band is a great game in and of itself, but the game explodes with all manner of awesome when used in its intended manner – with a four piece rock band! The game is fun to watch as well as play. It’s the social aspect of team work and ribbing that takes place. I think, despite our reputation for solidarity, gamers need human contact too.

But the appeal of Rock Band extends to non-gamers as well! I’m hearing stories, and I’d love to see actual stats, that people are having Rock Band parties instead of bar hopping or trivia nights. I feel like I’ve arrived at a place where all my fantasies about what is cool are coming true. You can stop laughing, computers (and games) are cool now.

I’ve taken to using the term “tattoo company.” You know, the kind of place that you love so much and believe in so deeply that you would get their logo tattooed onto your body. There are very few companies like this, at least big companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, maybe even IBM are a few examples. They have corporate cultures that extend beyond their stock price and financial ledgers.

The place I work at now is not a tattoo company and I fear that they never will be one and that saddens me because what we do is really cool. We provide a capitalistic solution for what is essentially a socialistic need. I could totally get behind that! Rock on! Helping people! Making money! The problem is that, like most companies, we take the approach of “just good enough” and I can’t live like that. I have to do my best. If I can’t do my best because of other people I stop caring because I don’t want to live my life as one of those angry people who hates everyone. It’s tough to restrain passion – even if that passion is for things like user interface design, or web standards, or browser load times.

Sigh.