Panels at Anime Boston 2013

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting “When Gundam Goes Bad” at Anime Boston 2013 at 11:15am Friday May 24th in Panel 309. This is the second time giving this panel so it’ll be a slightly tweaked version. It was first presented at ConnectiCon 2013. I plan to be at Anime Boston all day Friday, with a possible stay over till Saturday. Anyone who wants to meet up can hit me up on twitter.

When Gundam Goes Bad

“The U.C. Gundam franchise has been held up over the past twenty years as the father of modern mecha anime. But while those original Gundam series were innovative and exciting, there is also a side of it there is extremely silly. We go over the details on when Gundam is extremely good, and when Gundam is laughably bad.”

Destiny: Zenith of a poisonous hype machine

 There is a poison that has been growing in gaming culture for some time now. In the last year or so I think it’s reached a zenith, and it is time that consumers start fighting back. The core gamers are told that there are threats to their hobby. That congress is legislating against their games, that iPhones and iPads are causing dedicated game consoles and game capable PCs to disappear. However, the real threat to gaming culture is internal, and is inflamed by PR firms who want to manipulate and gamers into buying into their story so they can sell games. Hype. Hype is the greatest danger to the gaming market and it is time that the majority of core gamers realized how they are being manipulated.

Of course, this could be a problem with the greater geek culture that has risen to prominence in the last ten years. Fans line up for hours to watch ten minutes of a film they are going to see in theaters in a few months. That waste of time and money has always baffled me, as I have always found myself with more media to consume than time to consume it. In gaming I’ve seen fans line up for hours to play a few minutes of Portal 2 at PAX East less than a month before release. The same for L.A. Noir, a game that wasn’t even worth playing even after the price had bottomed out. At NY Comic Con fans waited in line to watch game play of Batman Arkham City only a week or two before release.

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Podcast Challenges

I love podcasts. I listened to some podcasts before even iTunes started to support them but it wasn’t until they got rolled into the iTunes store that I became seriously dependent on them for entertainment during my daily commute and the more mundane tasks I have to suffer through during work. And now, as a podcast producer, I have a vested interest in the ecosystem around podcasts.

Before iTunes allowed podcasts into the store the way to actually get and listen to podcasts was tedious at best. Users had to download them using a desktop based RSS feed reader to download the audio files. Then the user would listen to it in their preferred MP3player on their PC or sync it onto their iPod or other MP3 players. After iTunes worked it into their store, things got a lot easier. Users could find and subscribe to the podcasts they wanted, and then iTunes would download them and delete them from the users computer and iPod after they listened to them. Users would still have to sync with their computers but the management of the audio files had become invisible.

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Hello 2013

This year has been insane, monumental… overwhelming. Two of the Podcasts from the Maximum Fun network both celebrated 2012 as a year for getting things done, and getting yours. “My Brother, My Brother, and Me” embraced 2012 as 20-does, in which they encouraged people to “get it done.” On “Jordan, Jesse Go!” the hosts declared the motto of 2012 “More Powerful Than Ever: Going Ape.”

Last year probably represents the biggest changes I’ve ever had... it was a huge amount of life experience crammed into a tiny year and I’m overwhelmed and burnt out by all of it. It’s as if I played catch up and then jumped ahead of where I should have been all within the same few months.

I’m not sure how to describe the total of what happened in 2012 in any kind of coherent way. I’m the same person I was a year ago in most ways, but at the same time I feel very different from even six months ago.

In 2012, I entered my first long term relationship; purchased by first new car; got a promotion to a much more exciting and high paying position, and purchased a my first home which marks the first time living on my own..

There is nothing really much more to say. I took got extremely lucky with some of it, and most of it I just pushed forward and took what I wanted.

Of course, some things suffered. I haven’t posted a blog post on Otaku in Review since October and haven’t been writing much outside of the “HEY LOOK AT MY HOUSE” posts on this blog. I also haven’t been seeking out any photography in the last few months…other than “ OH HEY, I BOUGHT A HOUSE.” Those hobbies have been replaced with learning how to paint and maintain a condo that is mine now… also paying for it.

I also kind of… let my diet fall apart at the end of the year with all the holidays and other distractions. So I’m at the weight I was when 2012 started. So the year 2013 will be the year that I not only endeavor to drop to my goal weight but hopefully learn how to adopt healthy eating habits. Low-carb dieting is how I lost the bulk of my weight but that really isn’t how I want to eat for the rest of my life.

So the general things I promise myself to do every year still stand. Fix my sleep schedule; which is a constant problem; get better organized, write more, take more photographs, and lose weight.

I do want to add another goal to this year: Go completely paperless. Not in getting rid of books or other such things but scanning mail and getting rid of it, moving to digital notebooks exclusively, using Evernote to transmit hand written notes. I don’t think “going paperless” means getting rid of all paper, but hand written notes should be catalogued digitally and then destroyed because there is no effective way to store and search it. So that is what I’m going to work on accomplishing this year: dump as much paper from my life as possible.

Happy New Year! Hope your 2012 was as great as mine and I hope you accomplish your goals for 2013!

Renovation Diaries, Part 3

So I had no idea exactly how large of a project this was going to be. After the last photos I enlisted help and cut everything in twice, rolled everything again, painted all the trim, touched up the ceiling in all the areas I painted, and then had to slowly fix the wall because the ceiling paint leaked. I’m wrecked, but I’m extremely happy with the way it’s turning out.

The kitchen still needs the back splash painted, I decided not to bother with tile at this point because the project has just gone out of hand. The wall is pretty much the color I pictured and I bought the table with it in mind before I even closed on the condo.

Also, sorry for the quality of some of these photos, I went through quickly just for some updates and now I’m pissed off at the quality but blah.

From Condo

From Condo

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