I’ve recently acquired some new web space and domain names.. So my blog will now be accessible at..

www.chaddavid.com

It’s a tad bit ugly/buggy at the moment. I have some customization, tweaking, and modifications to do before it’s truly ready for viewing, but feel free to take a sneak peek while I work on it. I will also have a portfolio site up eventually at www.chadelston.com, but more on that later…

……………………………………………………………

This last weekend I took part in the third ever Toronto Indie Game Jam, that coincidentally spaned across 3 days, AKA TOJam #3. On arrival I quickly realized that my apparent lack of plannering had landed me with a laptop, borrowed to me (by a very kind and generous individual), was not quite up to par with my expectations and left me kind of scrambling. It’s not that the laptop was a bad machine, it was just a little aged and slow and lacked the ability to install the software I needed to create my game (Flash/AS2, and Photoshop). As well, I had no mouse, only one of those funny little laptop keyboard nubs. So Friday was kind of a write-off which was a bit daunting to say the least. However due to some quick thinking and some craftyness I managed to get my old Dell desktop to the event, which despite it’s age (probably about 6-7 years old now) it still manages to hold it’s own with basic software such as Flash.

I had a lot of fun observing the other teams, which was also a little daunting since I wasn’t able to put together a “team” in time. The venue was pretty cool and kind of fit the whole idea of “indie” very well. I think it must of been some sort of abandoned factory; not sure because I hadn’t done any research on the location, I just knew how to get there. I went as a “one-man-show”, but it was nice to socialize and observe the kinds of languages and games others were designing and developing. I showed up a little late and was almost listed as a cancellation so I had no real official name card and ended up in the smaller, less aesthetic of the two rooms, which was fine with me really. I do have to say however, 30 machines running in unison can make for a pretty toasty oven of work-place which made my wardrobe choice of a thin t-shirt quite suitable. After some brief socializing I went straight into my game development mode which got to the point of nearly obsessive. I soon noticed that after 2 days I hadn’t really eaten much food since I wanted to spare no time in getting my idea up and running. While most teams had maybe a programmer, a graphics guy, a guy to handle a bit of both and sound, etc. I was self-endowed with the wide array of all these tasks (to be fair, I had help from a sound floater, a graphics floater, even though I didn’t actually use either assets in my game, and a very helpful guy named Paul.)

So my idea was Moon Cheese Money. A treacherous and humorous game where you, the main character Johnson, is sent to the moon by a silly and inuendo-filled 1950′s era dialogue, to mine precious moon cheese to help save America’s perilous economy. Johnson soon finds he’s joined by the evil commies who plan to steal his precious moon cheese, leaving his country in disarray. So I kind of poked fun at some old political jokes I guess. While many people were knee deep in code and game mechanics I tried to spend a generous amount of time playing around with story elements, and cute game-play quirks, while keeping my game simple enough that I didn’t drown in my own technical problems. Basically, you circle around the moon, find craters, blow them up with dynamite, collect the cheese, give the cheese to the little man in the rocketship that lands periodically, and avoid the commies who steal your cheese and your Johnsons (another word for “lives”) and thus make your president a very unhappy president.

I’m known to be a very ambitious artist/designer/coder often overshooting my abilities with wild ideas. This idea was seemingly too difficult at first, but I found ways to dance around my programming shortcomings to find ways to kind of “fake” a lot of things that would have required a serious amount of mathematics and algorithmic jargon. I’m definately not a toned mathlete so I tried to stick to methods that I would be familiar with. After all, I’m more of a creative thinker versus a more sophisticated logically minded techie. Or maybe it’s better to say I’m a bit of a blend since I love playing with Actionscript code, but I would never feel at home with ONLY code and restricted creative input.

Anyhow, I ran into some problems with collision detection and my fun little message box (the president’s head pops up to offer fun filled advice and notices during runtime). With some help I managed to get over those obstacles and I think my game really turned out to be what I had hoped. There were obviously some things I had to cut corners with due to the time restraints but it looked like people really enjoyed the humor of my game, even though there were some bugs here and there in the gameplay. I would be interested to play test the thing some more and come out with a more polished game later down the road.

I should mention a few of my favorite games. I can’t remember the names now, but I remember having fun with a game where you squash bugs with your keyboard. It had such a fresh tactile game mechanic that I’d never seen before in a game, and turned out to be really fun/addictive, so kudos to the team who came up with that one. I also really enjoyed a sea monster game, where you eat little people of little ships with a serpant sea monster avatar. I loved the quick point and click tongue flick gameplay, also a joy and quite addictive. I think the best game design in this challenge came from those who were able to find interesting ways to interact with their games, or a gameplay mechanic that has been previously unexplored in the industry, or previously unheard of. I also appreciated a game where you use drumsticks and an electronic drumpad controller to move your character onscreen; another great example of a tactile gameplay mechanic that was creatively employed. I had fun with all the games, however, and it was really neat to see how many variations people came up with, on this year’s theme. Good job to everyone reading this, who attended and designed/developed!

Anyhoo, that’s my little rundown of the event. I’ll look forward to attending next year! Thanks to the organizers who made such a neat event! I can’t post my game just yet due to TOJam rules, but stay tuned for when it will probably be uploaded along with all the other games to the TOJam site. I will try to upload some photos I took at the event soon. Stay tuned for updates.

……………………………………………………………

So I haven’t blogged in a long time because of my busy work schedule, but there have been a lot of things I’ve wanted to mention such as the Justice show I went to on the 17th of March (AMAZING!), and a related art show in Toronto from SO ME, the creative director for all of Ed Banger’s promotional artwork (amazing artist!!). I’ll leave that stuff for later and for now I’ll start with The Energizer iPod chargers that the focus group marketing people sent me. I don’t really have any obligation to review the product or recommend it to my friends/audience but according the honour system, they sent me free stuff so I should probably reciprocate in some form.

So the package looks like the one pictured to the right of this text and the product is called Energi To Go. Now the reason for such a product as a portable iPod charger is mainly about convenience. The ability to lose your ipod’s charge and then regain it quickly enough to blast out some more tunes on the way to your current destination without completely losing function of the device due to it’s low power. I suppose the secondary reason for a portable charger would be if you ever decided to take your gadget on a camping trip or somewhere where an immediate energy supply isn’t available.

For me, the main time I would need to use a product like this would be if I forget to charge my iPod one night and need to rush out the door in the morning with a dead battery on my device. This rarely occurs with me but did, in fact, occur quite recently in which I found the charger to be super useful. However, once I hooked up the charger to my iPod it made my iPod significantly clunkier (not by that much though) but the saving grace to this charger is that it doesn’t block the headphone jack. So for this reason I was able to plug my headphones in and play tunes while it charged which was really awesome. I’ve never had the problem of being without a computer for more then 24 hours (my iPod only came with a USB chord to charge/connect) so it would be possible but extremely rare that I would be without a means of charging the device such as a camping trip. However, for those who do frequently take these kinds of outings I would recommend the product.

Now I guess the other downfall is that the device relies on AA batteries. I had a hard time jamming the batteries into the slim slide-out cartridge and once I got the batteries in I realized that eventually they would indeed run out and I would have to spend more money on getting new batteries. It would be nice if there was a model of this charger that comes with a rechargeable battery pack. It would save money in the long run I think. I liked the size and form factor of the charger which is essentially just a plastic bar that fits in your palm. It fits easily into pockets or bags, or whatnot. I thought it was strange that the charger has 3 settings that you can set with a dial. The settings were “nano, 8gig, and 80 gig” I think, I can’t remember off the top of my head to be honest. But I remember noticing there was no iTouch setting which kind of threw me because I have an iTouch so I just picked the 80gig setting and it seemed to work fine. I think the settings are mostly just for the physical size of the iPod and not so much about the charging levels anyway, however, the dial didn’t have any grip on it which meant that I had to use a coin to change it. A little annoying but sort of a minor thing since it only needs to be set once unless you have multiple iPods of different sizes.

So that’s about it really. The thing has some minor quirks, comes in handy once in a blue moon, but I wouldn’t spend a boatload of money for one unless I was a frequent traveler with little chance to charge by conventional methods. So that being said, the device does what it’s supposed to do and the downsides are all pretty minor provided you fit the demographic for this thing so I’ll give it a 3.5/5 rating.

So how do I describe Blaqstarr? His sound is incredibly fresh to me, having listened to a fair share of Baltimore club beats. Bmore club is very repetative, which both lends to it’s unique charm and also it’s probable inability to hold the interest of people with short attention spans. Blaqstarr sort of takes this formula and cleans it out to it’s lowest common denominator. His beats are incredibly minimalistic, raw, and to the point. I find his stuff harsh, sharp, and hard-hitting and surprisingly enjoyable to listen to. I don’t know why, but his music really has a unique flair to it that is unlike any other Bmore club I’ve ever heard. This is probably the reason I love his music, it’s like a fresh gasp of air in a fairly uniform ocean of Bmore tracks.

……………………………………………………………

So today I’m gonna switch up the mix a little. Not because I worry my blog is getting too repetitive, more because I haven’t cooked anything since my succulent chicken fingers. So instead I’m going to talk about how I’ve recently gotten in touch with my inner consumer whore. I signed up for one of those marketing focus group things where they have you answer a survey and you test a product and all that jazz. It sounds pretty awesome to me. I basically sold my soul to satan (aka answered a few simple questions and gave my home address) and now they’re going to send me a “kit” with some accessories for my child (by child I mean my iTouch of course). Yes, I refer to all my technology as my children. Or sometimes as countries. Like my PSP, would be like Japan because it’s tiny but it’s super advanced and is beautiful to look at. My Xbox 360 would be my America, because it tends to favor media about shooting things, blood, and firepower. Also I’m pretty sure, judging by the power bar and loud hum of the fan, that it packs enough power to destroy my whole neighborhood if it ever overheats. Anyways I think I’ve thoroughly raped this analogy and should probably move on to better things. Like my new PSP game Patapon.

Yeah, so, Patapon is awesome for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it reminds me of Loco Roco, a game where you play in a super hypercoloured cartoon world of overly happy bouncing blobs in an overly happy world where everything has a face and smiles at you. It’s like one of those kids show cartoons where there is no such thing as “fuck” being “fucked” or “fucking”, only happy go lucky bouncing and fruit eating. Well actually, I guess I can’t really say there is no such thing as being “fucked” in this game, because the blobs are constantly being chased by evil flying black squid things that eat them, which is pretty fucked I guess. Also the blobs are able to explode into hundreds of tiny little mini-me blobs that can reform into one giant blob again, which is also pretty fucked. So while there is no “fuck” or “fucking”, there is plently of “fucked” or even “fucked up to be had”. But I wasn’t talking about Loco Roco, I was talking about Patapon, which seems almost like a distant cousin in the same vein.

In Patapon you continue the tradition of playing in a world that is proper “fucked” like its predecessor, mostly for the fact that you play as a war faring tribe of black eyeball people with little arms and legs. But what really makes this game awesome is it’s epic storyline. Get a load of this…

“The Patapon were a flourishing people until they were defeated by the evil Zigaton tribe. The player takes the role of their god and uses sacred war drums to direct the Patapon tribe to take back their land. As the story progresses, the Patapon also embark on a journey to Earthend to look upon “IT,” a sacred object whose appearance and purpose is unknown to the tribe.”

Now there are some definate things I find pretty awesome in this world, and a few of those things are 1) wardrums 2) commanding a legion of tiny tribal minions with axes and spears 3) commanding a a legion of tiny minions with axes and spears using wardrums. It’s also pretty awesome how hardcore these cute little eyeball men are. They constantly yell shit like “take no prisoners” and “to the ends of the earth” while they march which not only makes them a minion army, but a ruthless minion army; all my own. The army also has a war chant, which after about a half hour of playing, becomes imprinted in the very fabric of your brain. It goes something like this PATA PATA PATA PON. The little bastards also can go into fever mode if you beat the drum to their liking sending them into a berserker rage laying waste to everything in their path. So, the game sort of reminds me of Loco Roco meets 300.

The game is in a definite abstract Japanese style which further adds to it’s awesomeness. The creative rythem-game nature also lends to tried and true Japanese gaming conventions of past. I guess not everything is awesome about this game though. I mean most of it is a pretty magnificent, however the game’s biggest criticism comes with the fact that the gameplay can get mildly repetitive, which if that means you’re just constantly laying waste to an evil army and giant monsters with a legion of spear and axe wielding black eyeball men, then it isn’t an issue for me. The bigger, biggest criticism, though, comes with the fact that when your little mobile ocular army of carnage hits fever mode the tune they hum goes out of sync momentarily which can knock you off the prized fever mode. I personally didn’t find this that big of a design flaw because I think it may have even been intended. I mean, throwing the player off beat in a rythem game would make it more challenging, and isn’t that what video games are all about? Challenge? We can’t make the raping and pillaging of an evil eyeball empire an easy feat now can we?

Great game + cheap game + war drums and fucked up eyeball men + minor flaw = 9/10 final verdict. ^^

……………………………………………………………

Now on to some more tasty matters. I finally cooked a proper chicken dish that didn’t get proper fucked. Behold, via the amazing image viewer that is your browser, my crispy chicken strips complete with maple horseradish Canadian mustard syrup which, despite sounding odd, tasted surprisingly delightful. I’m also including an image of my, previously mentioned and ill fated, honey garlic chicken dish before it went into the oven to meet it’s broiling doom. So I guess you could say I’m getting pretty good at cooking basic meals. I think I need to up the ante a bit because chicken is not really as difficult as many might imagine. Usually all you really need to do is cut it up, wash it, season it or marinate it and then just throw it in the oven, done. I’ll take a good look through my cook book to come up with yet another fantastic gastronomical marvel. That word sounds so nasty… Gastronomical.. Anyways..

This weekend I’ll be having a small get together at my place, so I guess I should probably clean my home. Since I started my new job and got a gym membership, AND started karate again I’ve had very little time to do anything these days. There are so many things I want to do and so little time to do them all. I suppose I’ll have to start being picky. For an example, I want to delve into the art of being a DJ/Electronica artist as well as write a novel, but not sure when I’d have the time to practice or write. Right now I should probably just stick to finding time to clean my house. My bedroom has been disgusting for the past month at least but I’ve been too exhausted/busy to give a damn. If I have people over I’ll definitely need to do SOMETHING about my living conditions. I guess it’s also the perfect time to up the ante with my cooking since my get together will be a potluck. Mmmm.. Excellent… *shifty eyes*

……………………………………………………………

So my cooking scheme is going alright. I started cooking meat for the first time, second time (if you count a healthy rendition of sloppy Joes). For my first meat-meal I cooked a honey garlic chicken. I grated some ginger, mashed some garlic, added some honey and some soy sauce to the mix; everything was going well until I somehow missed the word “bake” in the recipe and proceeded to an oven setting, what some cookologists refer to as, “broil”. As a result my chicken didn’t look so tasty when it came out of the oven. Luckily I caught on to this problem early in the broiling process and was able to salvage my chicken. It had a sort of charred outter shell of burnt honey, yet the inside was miraculously still juicy and succulent. So I was able to still eat dinner that night which was, suffice it to say, pretty awesome.

Tonight I’ve decided to attempt another chicken dish. It’ll be a little more simple. Last night I cut up some boneless chicken breasts into strips and am currently marinating it in buttermilk. Tonight I’ll proceed to roll it in some bread crumbs and cook me up a fine batch of breaded chicken strips also known as chicken fingers. Well they’re not really fried so they’re technically not chicken fingers, also I don’t think chickens have fingers. The modern chicken’s anatomy, to my knowledge, consists soley of wings, nippleless breasts, drum sticks, and of course the chicken’s nuggets which I can only assume are hidden somewhere under it’s feathers. Anyways, I’ve gone onto some sort of freaky tangent now; what was I talking about? Oh yes, my cooking skills. Well that’s really all that’s new with me other then the fact that I can’t get my basement neighbors to stop smoking in my house. Every night the damn place reeks of smoke, makes me feel nauseous, and probably increases my risk of contracting some sort of cancer. At least their dog stopped yapping every fucking minute of the day. My house is old, so it’s walls are like paper, any kind of scent, smoke, or sound travels with ease. I’ve talked to them countless times and they always say they’ll stop. Our house is supposed to be a non smoking environment, but I guess I can’t force them to stop, so my only options are to wait until they grow tired of the basement and leave, get evicted (please please please), yell at them a bunch until they inevitably roll their eyes at me, or maybe get hit by lightening/buried in snow? Well, I guess I’ll have to wait and see…

……………………………………………………………

Well I’m living alone now for a week and I figured it’s probably a good time to bust out my mad cooking skills. So far I’ve almost mastered breakfast meals. I’ve learned how to cook pretty much every form of prepared egg imaginable (omlettes, scrambled, sunny side up, hardboiled, etc.). I’ve also got the art of the pancake down pretty well. Today I decided to try something new and I fried up some store-bought blintzes and then made my own fresh strawberry and raspberry sauce. I decided that it would be too sour if I just fried up the strawberries and raspberry’s alone so I threw in some raw blue agave necter to sweeten things a bit. I think it turned out pretty well. It was pretty damn tasty.. I added some plain yogurt in there too but it was pretty sour and I think it counterbalanced the sweetness of my sauce. Furthermore, I’ve definately mastered the art of frying up home fries. They’re pretty simple but with added onions and smoked paprika they taste soooo f-n good.

So now that I’ve mastered the art of breakfast meals it only seems proper for me to move onto more involved meals. I think tonight I will try my first “meat” dish and fry up a stir fry. I already have some frozen chicken and I should have the rest of the ingredients lying around. It definately helps to have a gourmet, cooking enthusiast, mother. All our utensils are top quality and the house is always stocked with random top quality ingredients. Makes my learning easier since I don’t have to spend so much time trying to find things or shop for things. I also seem to get really paranoid about food saftey. Again my mother is also a food safety trainer so I’ve learned a few things, but for some reason I can’t shake the concern that food I’m cooking with may have gone bad. At any rate I’ll be posting more on the stir fry later once I give it a shot. Bye for now!

Artist of the week: As many of you know I’m an avid club culture music fan. My tastes vary over multiple styles and genres of club/electro music. I love B-more club and French electro so I figured I’d include these things in my blog discourse moving forward. Click on the Teenage Bad Girl image in this post to see a new electro artist I just found that’s in the same vein as most of the stuff on Ed Banger Records. More on this shit later.

……………………………………………………………

So it’s Valentine’s day, another made up holiday where you are made to feel obligated to spend money for the sake of proving your love for your significant other in order to counter their own insecurities regarding the legitimacy of your relationship. And it’s only on this day that it’s required; I mean, buy roses for your girlfriend any other day and it’s super sweet and thoughtful, but, buy them on valentines day and it wasn’t just thoughtful because you made the right decision. In this case you’ve saved yourself from the dreaded consequences of not caring for your significant other on this monstrosity of a holiday that Greeting Card companies have unleashed on this earth. Christmas is similar, only instead of love/sex it deals with the social dynamics of family relationships, but I tend to go easier on the obsurdity of Christmas because unlike Valentines day, Christmas used to be a REAL holiday fueled by religious belief and positive undertones. I’m not Christian or religious, but I think that having substance underneath the hype of the holidays not involving greed and insecurity is important.

This brings me to something I was thinking today while talking to a friend my friend Jennifer Peters. That something was, “what the hell does ‘be my valentine’ mean anyway?” Like, does it mean you’re asking for sex? Or maybe some lovin’? Or maybe you’re just asking for some innocent affection? I’m sure if you already have a girlfriend or wife you wouldn’t be asking for someone to be your Valentine since they’re already established as your other half. So theoretically “be my valentine” is more of a request to someone who may not necessarily be involved with you romantically at the time. Which also suggests that being a valentine is something that must be requested and accepted or you can’t brag about this girl being your valentine. But if someone agree’s to this “valentine” relationship, it really can only last until the end of Valentine’s day and then you got nothing, which makes me question the motives of having a valentine.

I think some guy should take a girl out with him to the bar and out with his friends until his friends are like “who’s this? Your girlfriend?” and he can be like “No dawg, this is my valentine.” and then the friends can be like “what do you mean?” and then the guy would answer his phone and be like “Oh hey baby-it’s my girlfriend one sec guys-yeah, yeah, I love you too, see you tonight.” and then he could be like “Hey so my valentine wants to get out of here, catch u later guys.” Hahaha.. It’d be awesome.

The only real criticism I can honestly provide about this movie is that the constant shakiness and long shots where you can’t really see much made it drag just a tiny bit. Also they have a “money shot” scene where you see the monster’s face dead on for like 2o seconds, which was really lame because it looked really CG to me and kind of broke the effect the movie had on me. Also I think it’s better, being that much of this movie’s appeal is based on mystery, that you don’t actually have a direct “money shot” of the monster. I liked only catching glimpses of it, it made it feel more realistic, like what I would see if I were actually there. I think it would be pretty rare to catch a top down diagonal, full body clear view of a giant city leveling monster for more then 15 seconds, if I were actually there. All I would really see would be maybe just a giant foot moving through dust, or a tail swiping around a corner and that’s it.

So it was great. I’d give this movie a 3.5/5 if I were an official critic. Mostly just because it was an excellent movie, but most of it’s appeal is derived from it’s sheer creativity and the unique quality in the way it was shot. I mean the characters were a little dry, and there wasn’t much of a plot (not that I’m suggesting this style of film should have one). Had it been shot more like a normal Hollywood movie without shaky cam, with the tense orchestra music, and familiar stars, etc. then it would just be a sub par boring thriller full of glitzy and beautiful destruction and carnage sequences you can get in any action flick these days.