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Rev. Brandon Teel

[ website | The Andore Seven ]
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[24 Oct 2009|03:02pm]
Alright, in case you haven't been vigourously hitting the refresh button on my sites for months/years hoping for an update: There have been "irreconcilable differences" with the person who was holding the keys to our webspace; I will deign not to discuss the circumstances. We have a Twitter up to keep whoever would like to know informed of our location changes; if you'd like to follow that, it's at http://www.twitter.com/andore7.

Also: Lv. 27 today. I must be getting old because I'm not nursing a Birth-of-Athena hangover from getting blackout Vodka drunk. In fact, I did not get drunk at all. I had a Guinness and played Xevious. :-\
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[19 Oct 2009|11:11pm]
I've been putting off talking about Texas because it's difficult to put what I feel about it succinctly into words. Every time I've tried it's turned into some unwieldy beast of a travelogue, which I don't think does it justice; long, awkward sentences all trying to capture every single moment I spent down there. What was important about Texas was that I felt alive. Far, far away from my, as a great poet put it, "beige existence" of abandonment issues and compulsive masturbation in beautiful Kelowna, British Columbia; this fucking prison that I had never actually thought that I had any place away from.

There was fine dining in gay burger joints which had soap operas on the TV and music that sounded right out of town crawling in Persona 3, there was cheap malt liquor and drunken homoeroticism and underwear parties. Surprisingly, no frottage. There were long trips on the road and Ben's rather circuitous sense of direction driving Fuckhead and Hermit near to insanity. And there was cosplay, with the pretty, pretty boys only overshadowed by the sexy lady in cutoff jean shorts and a tank top. And, lest we forget, there was Arcade UFO; a fucking work of art - they had an honest-to-god Gals Panic machine AND a Neo Geo with motherfucking TWINKLE STAR SPRITES. Oh and a bunch of other games which the kids seem to like, all immaculately cared for, and a hacked DDR machine in which everyone danced the goddamn FFVII boss theme every five minutes, but whatever. We're here for the Twinkle Star Sprites, because Twinkle Star Sprites is a man's game. More on that later.

Oh, and there was sexual tension. Lots of sexual tension, At least for two of us there. Suffocatingly thick, really. Oh dear, I did it again.

What was really there, in a soppy, sentimental sort of way, was love; finally meeting people I've known for longer and more intimately than anyone outside of my immediate family. They offered me a place to go and escape from the miserable place I had found myself trapped in. And, well, the more conventional kind of love, too, the kind of love that gradually forms over many years, gestates on cramped road trips and is abetted by nature herself with a conspiracy of clear nights and a big, bright moon to make sweet admissions underneath. Oh, sure, I wasn't really supposed to do that, and I kind of found myself overstepping into another man's territory, but that is something I have found myself doing far too often in my romantic career. Things have worked out about as well as they possibly could, better than I could have imagined, if a bit unconventionally. Honestly, if you meet an incredibly awesome, beautiful lady who you feel completely comfortable with, who will dress up as motherfuckin' Revy - this is not something you pass up on account of minor logistic issues. Things are awesome, aside from the whole being three-thousand kilometers away - which I will rectify shortly.

Oh, and Twinkle Star Sprites? People, there is nothing better than Twinkle Star Sprites in the arcade, manly spirits clashing over an RGB monitor, sweat and blear and carpal tunnel in the gladiatorial combat of cute little girls and effeminate boys shooting balloon monsters over candy-coloured wonderlands. Have you ever faced off against the boyfriend of the woman you find yourself in love with in the arena of Twinkle Star Sprites? Imagine great elk charging their immense frames forward and clashing their antlers together with a mighty crash. Except the great elk are two nerdy dudes. And our antlers are our lollipop joysticks, and our clashing together is through the medium of pastel-coloured shoujo fantasy, and the mighty crash is trash talk such as "Don't hate the cosplayer, hate the Alice Game~". Yes.

By the way, I was totally dominating. Hermit was the only one who could consistently beat me, oh ho. Brooke did beat me once, too, which was awesome. Pro tier, man.

That was Texas.  Pro-tier, man.


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[31 Aug 2009|03:18pm]
So uh, for the very first time, I re-bought a bunch of comic books.


Read more... )

This Wednesday, I'm taking a flight out to Dallas.  Holy shit, people.  Going to meet with a good chunk of the old EA crew and hopefully my stomach will hold out well enough for me to have an utter blast.  Among other things, we're hitting up some ghetto anime convention, we managed to convince [info]deadshrimpblues to don a Revy (Black Lagoon) costume, [info]rosceau has endeavoured to put together a Reisen (Touhou) costume, I am donning the Lillian Seifuku once more, and we're set to make complete fools of ourselves yet again.  Should be a most excellent time!
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[21 Mar 2009|12:31pm]
Dearest Andoremaniacs,

I have not been feeling well at all for the past several weeks, not particularly helped by my attempts to wean myself off certain medications in an attempt to clear up certain side effects.  I do not feel like writing when I am instead wholly miserable about being cooped up, and instead spend my time working myself into an existential rut.  I realize that no one actually reads Andore, but I still feel guilty that I haven't updated it in quite some time; particularly after resolving that I would bring it regular updates to at least the end of the year.  Forgive me my shitty body.

I was given a new TV, and I feel ungrateful because I hate it.  20" Toshiba SDTV, pretty nice in every way EXCEPT that you can't switch off this horrible filtering it does on the image, oversharpening it to the point where a component input looks sub-composite.  And what the fuck, if I open the menu, it temporarily turns off this Vertical Scan Modulation shit and I can actually see the lovely, perfect image behind it!  But nope, can't turn it off.  And fuck getting an HDTV because my hilariously, almost autistically exacting image specifications I've developed would necessitate finding a rare $350+ upconverter box for the upscaling/deinterlacing on my old consoles to be anywhere near acceptable.  Fuck the HD revolution man, it's just a scam to make my Nintendo and PS2 games look like shit.  MAAAAAAN.
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[15 Mar 2009|02:33am]
I'm finally finished with Persona 3, after spending 200 hours and playing through twice. Well, not with The Answer, but I need a break - I'm under the illusion that continuing the story is somewhat gratuitous, anyway. It was an unbelievably good game, though. Really, I can't believe how much it wrapped me up in its world; games just don't do that for me anymore. Particularly Japanese RPGs! Read more... )

Favorite girl: Elizabeth, there is just no contest.  BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT BOLDLY ACCEPT.  I didn't beat her as BONUS SUPERBOSS because it was the usual tiresome exercise in exacting specifications and oppressive turn monitoring, along with having half the potential strategies arbitrarily prohibited, topped off with a mandatory 5-10 minute climb to fight her.  But Elizabeth - my love for strange girls with pretty voices trumps everything else.  I was initially down with Mitsuru - and she's cute, but a little predictable.  I wound up liking Fuuka a lot, and despite being basically indifferent to her through the first play, I dug Yukari for her level 10 scene - nice to see a girl who knows what she wants, anyway.  Aigis' level 10 was cute, too.  I would have dropped them all for Liz, though.  Elizabeth Uber Alles.

Favorite S.Link: Hermit, which I thought would be kind of annoying, but was really cute and spot on, and the epilogue scene is probably my favorite scene in the whole game.

Personas:  I wound up basically powering through everything with Flauros, then Cu Chulainn, then Thor, then Melchizedek, and finally Michael on the first time through.  It was nice, once I had the levels, to have Jesus and three flavours of Satan hanging around.  I'm way too much of a pragmatist.

Other assorted comments:  Thirteen fucking forms for the last boss, is that some kind of new record?  I'm just happy they had some common decency and didn't decide to just say "fuck it" and do the whole Major Arcana; I already spent like two hours the first time through fighting the last boss.  "Oh, it's midnight, but I'm so close to the end, it shouldn't take THAT long, should it?"  Famous last words when you have an appointment the next day.
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[03 Mar 2009|07:45pm]
This is the most amazing thing I have ever heard. EVER.
(The rest of the album is available on this dude's account, there are also some other avenues to listen to it that I will leave you to find for yourself)
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[01 Mar 2009|01:56pm]
I'm getting really tired of my body, you know?  Until around the summer of '07 I was ridiculously healthy; I'd bike or lift weights or run almost every day.  My stomach started to go south in the summer of '07, I thought it was my heart, which it thankfully was not.  Then I started getting dizzy spells last march; enormous, disorienting sinus pressure that I've found seems to coincide with eating, and then I started feeling short of breath.  The shortness of breath is probably less worrisome than it sounds and is probably (like everything) connected to my stomach or the drugs I'm taking in some way; as there is literally nothing wrong with my breathing aside from a feeling like I'm not getting enough air sometimes.

So I went off the pills for a few weeks in November-December to see if it would help with the breathing or dizziness (no) , and eventually, when the pain and nausea got bad enough, I went back on, but have been having a lot of trouble getting back to the "miserable but not entirely intolerable" baseline I had been at.  So I haven't really been able to get out much in the past two months even if I'd like to, as whenever I step out the door I feel like shit.  It sucks!  Even as I decide to start rebuilding some of those Social Links this year (and hopefully become capable of summoning Baphomet or something by the end of the year), my body decides that I should become a unwilling hermit all on its own!

If you were so inclined, I wouldn't worry about me too much.  The doctor sure doesn't seem to be!  I had an ultrasound in January, it came back completely normal, so I guess my insides aren't completely rotting away.  I'm just frustrated.  WHO KNOWS MAYBE IT'S ALL JUST IN MY HEAD.  I did spend five years or so of this decade driving myself fucking insane, so it really isn't out of the question I suppose.

If I ever do feel as well as I did a few years ago, remind me never to take it for granted again?
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[31 Jan 2009|06:11pm]
Why didn't anyone tell me that Persona 3 was the best traditional japanese-style RPG in the past nine years, one which single handedly redeems the PS2's generally abysmal RPG library (even doing so while still taking the two-hit suckerpunch combo of Final Fantasy X and Xenosaga into consideration)?  Oh wait, everyone did, I just ignored them because I thought it was more "fighting twice the number of random battles because you have to coerce monsters with arbitrary and random dialog trees to get anywhere" type RPGing, when it turns out it's not!  Maybe I ought to give the other Megaten games another fair shot despite the enforced grinding.

Still feeling good about Andore!  This is surprising and strange.  I'm fully aware that my posts haven't honestly been terribly strong - I have lost most of that apoplectic solipsism of youth that flavoured my earlier work, to the benefit of my mental state but to the detriment of me producing anything particularly distinctive.  I don't mind all that much, though.  I've got a notepad full of ideas, and my feelings toward writing are gradually ceasing to be akin to dental surgery.  Hell, I'm only a month out of retirement, maybe I'll find my voice again.
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[14 Jan 2009|09:13pm]
Andore Jr. has been going splendidly.  It's my hope that we can keep this up for longer than a few weeks but - well - you know us.  Still, I've got a much better feeling about this than I have had in a long time!

Oh, and we have an LJ feed now.  In case you don't want to look at my lovely web design and instead want to view the articles as awkwardly marked up by Livejournal's RSS reader.  Up to you really!
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Happy New Year [31 Dec 2008|05:12pm]
Happy new year, kids.

http://andorejr.zeroesunlimited.com
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[14 Dec 2008|06:39pm]
andorejr.zeroesunlimited.com/test/test.html

I've made my design work in a godawfully inelegant way that completely breaks on low resolutions.  It rankles with my stubborn streak but, as everyone in IRC is telling me (mostly because I am completely impossible to tolerate when I am in the process of butting heads with something until either it breaks or my head does), it doesn't matter, everyone uses larger screen resolutions now, design a mobile version later.  So, my question is: Are these compromises acceptable?  Have you found any exciting ways to break it that don't involve viewing it in Internet Explorer 6 because just fuck you man

Dear CSS, I could have marked up a functional version of this page with tables, without ridiculous hacks, that doesn't fucking break at low resolutions in a couple of hours.  I have come up with this hideous workaround after scrapping and clawing at this page for six months.  What is your fucking problem, CSS?

Edit: ROM TEST OK

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[20 Nov 2008|05:41pm]


Bug report to Microsoft: Cannot select any motif other than "insufferable hipster douche" for store-brand Mii knockoffs.

My moustache really is quite impressive though.
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[12 Nov 2008|07:05pm]
So Braid is an excellent game and I would recommend it to others, but please stop writing, Jonathan Blow. I understand you are very enthusiastic to tell your story, whatever it is, and don't want anyone to actually miss the profundities you've imbued your game with; but when you talk up the storytelling potential of the medium, have bits of potentially interesting abstract narrative within the game itself - as well as one really fantastic piece of in-game storytelling at the end - and then fall back on reams of obnoxious purple prose to do the narrative's heavy lifting, it only demonstrates that you don't really trust the storytelling potential of the medium.

Also the effects that the environment and rules had on the music was really cool, but the music itself was hopelessly lame. Real Muthafukkin' Game Design Gs don't just license some E-Z Listening New Age crap off the Myspace or something as an afterthought, they compose their own or get someone to compose music for their game. Music FOR their game, not music coincidentally kind of sounding like it would fit in the game. Kind of like how you got that dude who does the webcomic you got to do the graphics, and those turned out pretty awesome! I am sure I do not fully understand all the difficulties involved in game design, but as every other part of the game showed an intense and personal attention to detail, and as music is traditionally the emotional lynchpin of video game design, throwing up your hands and chucking in K-Tel's Tranquil Moments as the game's soundtrack is some weak shit, man.
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[09 Nov 2008|10:30pm]
I have decided to try, and have gradually, over the years, come to put in action, designing web pages the right way; separating content and layout with CSS, using <div> tags rather than laying everything out in a table which, according to PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGNERS, is Against The Sacred Laws of Table Usage (thou shalt only use tables to display tabular data!), and so on. I try! I don't want to be the pitiable fool some very important PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGNER stares down his bifocals and grins condescendingly upon.

That said, I remember grappling with tag soup back in the days of HTML 2 and 3, and while it was a maddening process of trying to make sense of all the tables nested within tables nested within tables, I could make a column stretch vertically across the entire page without any real problems. This does not seem to be the case with CSS, because CSS seems to think that "height = 100%" means "the height of your browser window!" for some utterly nonsensical reason. So while I managed to get it to do what I wanted after hours of fumbling and vainly trying out suggestions from forum posts, now I find that whenever the content in the sidebar column is longer than the main column everything falls apart. I want to do this properly, but if I fudged it and hacked something together, I could have a solution in a minuscule fraction of the time it's been taking me to try and force the page to do what I want while I attempt to hold it all together since the current solution is something akin to superstition and magic.

And of course I find out it does this within minutes of gearing up to actually put the layout online. Fuck I hate the Web.
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[04 Nov 2008|08:12pm]
From one lousy little Canuck, I'd just like to thank you Americans down there. You guys did pretty good this time.
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[30 Oct 2008|06:14pm]
This Halloween I am going as a dude with two bloody cotton pads in his mouth, doped up on Tylenol 3s, and haunted by the ghosts of his missing wisdom teeth.
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On the topic of Mega Man 2... [30 Sep 2008|02:29am]
Holy Shit

It's hard to tell whether this is a Mario hack or a Mega Man 2 hack - really, the point seems to be moot, because it looks like Japanese romhackers have pieced together some kind of freakish chimera of Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man 2. Plus an Air Man ga Taosenai NSF. And yeah, it seems like Air Man is considerably more difficult to Taosu as Mario!

Yeah, I've only been talking about video games for quite a while, but there's really not much else that I feel like I can, or want to, talk about. And shit kind of sucks right now, so eight-bit video games are my refuge.
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[26 Sep 2008|03:15am]
Up all nite writin' 'bout Mega Man )
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[23 Sep 2008|03:20am]
Back when the Playstation was king, and the N64... well, it had Goldeneye, I was getting into RETROGAMES. Which is kind of funny, because I would be totally mortified to think of games as retro nowadays in the same kind of time frame I was looking at with big sparkly doe eyes behind rose-coloured glasses. Bringing together my skepticism towards 3D, my (vindicated!) wariness that games would become confusing and imprecise, and the fact that emulators were coming to maturity and I could play a lot of old games with the only cost being the nagging feeling that I was dooming some poor programmer to destitution, I sort of became a stodgy old conservative about those eight and sixteen-bit era games while still in High School. Of course, in High School, where your every preference would be judged, graded, and branded on your forehead, I was met with some weird stares and occasional derision when talking games with other nerdy-minded peers, enrapt by the flashy 3D worlds of the games of the day. But I knew they'd come back one day. They allllll come back.

I eventually did grow to accept 3D, mostly spurred on because I really liked Final Fantasy in those days. Still, gaming is a two step tango with progress. With every advancement and innovation, something is lost, and then it's rediscovered a generation or two later and is treated like a new revelation from the saints and angels and Ace Ebb. Looking back on the games of that era, I feel I was vindicated - the 3D games tended to look like total dog shit, really, and the 2D games of the era are gorgeous, have a timeless sort of quality, and will inevitably be lazily ported to every device from now until the heat death of the universe. More than that, my prediction that the industry moves in cycles and NES-era design would be king again was... well, totally wrong! But! As we children of the eighties and nineties trudge toward and reluctantly stumble past thirty, a considerable number of we supposed adults are finding ourselves in front of our game consoles, dearly missing summer days with lemonade, a stack of Nintendo Powers, singing nonsense songs, battling some terrible boss to whom we didn't even know the words with which to curse it. Do we really need these trumped-up and self-important, bleak, plodding, overcomplex, and busywork-laden modern games to remind us that our adulthood is trumped-up and self-important, bleak, plodding, overcomplex, busywork-laden, and completely fucking awful?

What I'm saying is that Megaman 9 is out, it's beautiful and wonderful and it's everything I wanted it to be. I hope it sells a million and maybe more, and every company out there crams as much retro-styled material down my gullet as they can crank out until I hate video games forever.

(Oh yeah, and on the topic of the best NES game getting a proper sequel, Bionic Commando Rearmed is pretty good too, and deserves some consideration. What with it also being the co-best NES game and all, and also recently receiving an update.)
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[31 Aug 2008|03:11am]
Key Words: Evangelion, Cosplay, Cheap Thrills, Husky Shinji )
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