Super nerd bros. brawl

You won’t believe what I did last night:

Yeah! Midnight launch! Can you dig it?

See all those people wrapped around Best Buy? They’re standing in line for a copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Normally I wouldn’t associate myself with a group that stands outside of a store at midnight for a dumb video game. But now I am one of them. I’m part of their group.

I was planning on getting the game this week, but I was kinda bored last night and couldn’t sleep — and I saw that the Best Buy in Evanston was opening at midnight to take gamers’ hard-earned money. So becoming excited at the prospect of being able to play the game right away, I put on my coat and went over to the store where I saw the above herd o’ nerd waiting outside of the store. It was rather cold and I was like, forget that, and I went and filled up my car and came back like ten minutes later.

The line was inside the store now, and moving quickly, so I waltzed in. Five minutes later I waltzed out with my copy.

Then I got home and played it for ten minutes, then fell asleep.

But was it worth it? Yeah, why not.

For the record I got a good hour with the game today and it’s pretty fun. Rockin’ review forthcoming?

The blair self-indulgence project, or: The ghost in the pro tools machine

Last night I was getting some work done while half paying attention to the Grammy awards on TV. It’s nice to see people being recognized who deserve extra recognition. One of those people is Rich Costey, who mixed the phenomenal-sounding new Foo Fighters record (Echoes, Silence, Patience, & Grace).

Anyway, Mr. Costey’s been on my mind lately because the new Mars Volta release (The Bedlam in Goliath) also sounds really nice, and I was reading an interview the other day in which he described his usage of Kyma for sound manipulation. So I went on a little Google bender to see if I could find more articles where Costey discusses his techniques, and stumbled upon a gem from MP3.com on the making of The Bedlam in Goliath. It’s an interview with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, where he describes how mixing sessions went wrong thanks to a cursed Ouija board:

“And these things keep happening and they happen in front of Rich Costey, my mixing engineer, who’s a very scientific man. So he’s the type of person that you tell this story to and he says, “No, it’s your imagination. You’re making connections that aren’t there.” And he sees it finally. Throughout the process, tracks disappear before his very ears or before his very eyes, however you want to look at it. And we go backwards into the older playlists and it say that the track never existed and there’s no history of it. We go backwards into the older drives and there’s no history.

And he just can’t understand it. He goes home and he does research and he comes back the next day. He says, “You know what it is, I figured it out. I looked it up. It’s quantum entanglement. It’s not a curse. It’s quantum entanglement.” So for Rich, he needs a scientific explanation, which is quantum entanglement, whatever the fuck that is, and for us we see it as the curse. It seemed evident that there was so much fighting against [making] the record that the only way to lift the curse was to actually finish the record. This became my everyday battle with tracks disappearing and going through three different computers and 16 different drives that this insanity of wanting to give up on the project and just start fresh with something else and wipe my hands clean of it, but understanding that if I do that things won’t be right and we’ll just keep having this bad luck. And so that’s the long version there.”

I really just had to laugh at that one.