The Deli Downstairs, Austin, TX
I was foolish — so very foolish — to think that I would post every day at SXSW, or even post a recap. Look, man, things got all crazy and now I’m moving to Florida for a new job. Beach! Sunshine! Design! Code! BUT! This blog is about food, and although I have let you down in the past (and no doubt will again in the future), I am here, now, posting, and that’s what matters most. Right?
Let’s talk about The Deli Downstairs.
SXSW Interactive: Day 0, Part 1
Well, I’m in Austin, at South By Southwest Interactive.
Here’s the deal: I plan to eat my words from the previous post and provide you with titillating coverage of both the fascinating sessions I attend and the food (and drink) I consume. I believe the kids call that double-bloggin’ like a maniac.
I’ll be honest: it may not happen. I may forget all about you. I may be too tired to go on. But let’s look on the bright side: right now, I remember you and am not tired! So let’s do it!
I don’t have anywhere to go today (well, registration, eventually) so I’ve been wandering around downtown Austin.
Look, Um
I love you, I really do, but I started this blog at a remarkably wrong time.
I have iPhone photos of food, drink, and (AND) video games accumulating in a folder, along with a number of mysterious files with the extension “.guilt”. I haven’t found the application that opens them yet, but I suspect that if I drag them over to the dock, onto the icon that represents my very soul, they will launch and consume me.
I don’t want that, so to stave off the inevitable horror, here’s a formal notification for you: I’m too busy. I have to figure this thing out. I love writing about food, drink, and video games but have to figure out how to summon the mood to do so for more than 10 entries in a row.
One of the many reasons that I’m too busy is the fact that I will be attending SXSWi this weekend, (hopefully) blogging nonstop over at camerondaigle dot com. So there’s that.
Hopefully, when I return, I will be energized, refreshed, and ready to write that Mass Effect 2 review before Mass Effect 3 arrives.
(In the meantime, download Toy Soldiers on XBLA. You won’t be sorry.)
Converging On An Apex, Certainly
Now that I’m done with work and work-after-work, I’m going to take time out of my designated Assassin’s Creed 2 Time tonight to write to you about Assassin’s Creed 2.
Looking back on the sad, bare handfuls of entries from the initial iteration of PropCal as a Video Game Blog Only, there’s a surprising amount of Assassin’s Creed (1) in the mix. I suppose that the kind of mood I need to be in to write about video games is a similar methodical mindset that compels me to play a circular, repetitive, Chinese-water-torture game like Assassin’s Creed 1.
Technical achievements have a way of obfuscating the actual creation that they are there to support (if the framing of that sentence gave you pause, please note: the question of whether Game is supported by Tech or the other way around or if both are subservient to Story is so much of another beast entirely, and you may want to stop reading fairly soon) and can even serve as intentional misdirection away from greater, more fundamental flaws.
There is a movie that was recently released (and, some might say, at least two movie directors that survive exclusively through this means) that many argued was a triumph of technical skill over artistic merit.
But! Both are so very subjective in the world of film for those who don’t speak the cinematographic language. If the key lighting is bad (and, according to my cinematographer friend, the key (keyframe? Somebody out there knows what I’m talking about) lighting in said director’s previous work (it’s about a boat that sinks) was very bad), the vast, vast majority of viewers are never, ever going to realize that that particular job of that particular craftsman was not done to its full potential.
Video games, however, don’t have the luxury of an uninformed laity. Participants (gamers, if you must) are by definition forced to interact with the game on a level that the game defines. The requirement is much more than ‘sit in a chair and possess at least two senses’. Gamers develop a literacy within a particular game’s environment that allows for fairly informed & objective analysis of the game in question.
That’s just a bit of nonsense that I’ve wanted to write in a blog post about video games for a while. Now that that’s over with:
Rotate The Right Analog Stick 90º To Interact
I finished Mass Effect 2 yesterday — it took me about 30 hours. I just played the Heavy Rain demo, and that took me maybe 20 minutes. Let’s talk about Heavy Rain.
Heavy Rain, if you’re not aware, is an upcoming adventure(ish) game made by a studio named Quantic Dream (coolest name ever) and headed by Quantic Dream CEO David Cage (also coolest name ever). It is a very expensive game with very high-quality visuals.
Heavy Rain is an interesting new take on the intention of a Video Game User Interface.
The Saints
I never lived in New Orleans – at least, I don’t remember living there. When my father finished medical school, we moved to his residency in South Carolina.
I was born in a hospital somewhere in downtown New Orleans. I was born in a tall, grey rectangle that my parents would point out to me as we drove by on the interstate, coming to town to visit my grandparents. I don’t know the name. It was next to the Superdome.
I remember a few things from those New Orleans visits. My grandparents (my father’s parents, the Daigles) lived in Gretna, across the river from downtown. We would take the ferry across the Mississippi to visit the French Quarter, avoiding the palm readers’ booths on our way to watch the street musicians and eat beignets at Café du Monde.
Guess What Is Totally Here, And Yay
Hey kids! A bit of housekeeping: the RSS feed is now fixed. So now you can subscribe to that instead of feverishly refreshing all day. (Right!)
Anyway: My Mass Effect 2 Collector’s Edition got Amazon Primed to my doorstep yesterday, and I managed to carve out a few (very late) hours to break it open and start it up.
So let’s get to the Brief But Exciting First Impressions, complete with blurry late-night box shots! (That sounds dirty!) Click “continue reading”, or push me off the balcony to earn Renegade points!
The Greatest Coffee Mug
You know how, in Super Mario Bros. level 1-1, when you grabbed the star — and Mario began blinking wildly — the music jumps into that doubletime melody — and you know by instinct that your time in this invincible mode is very limited — sprinting wildly toward the finish, holding down B, running headlong into Goombas, all caution thrown to the wind?
My life is kind of like that lately, except without the invincibility part. Nevertheless, I care about You The Reader so much that I’m sacrificing Regain Sanity Via Super Mario Galaxy Time to write you a lovely post.
However! This post is about Drink, not Food or Video Games! So let’s get going. Today I’m going to craft a loving ode to the item I was staring at in boredom for an hour this morning while waiting in line to get my emissions checked (I mean my CAR’S emissions! Ha HAAAaaaaa.)
My coffee mug! But not just ANY coffee mug — the Greatest Coffee Mug Ever Made, now celebrating its 9th(ish) birthday!
Exuberance In Progress
I know you needed a breather after the double-barreled blog barrage I fired your way earlier this week, so I decided to give you some days off.
I’m lying! But you knew that already, some of the nervous sweat being flung at your face by my (also nervous) tic landed in your eyes! I’m not a very good liar. What really happened is my job exploded due to some unexpected things happening, the details of which did not involve food, drink OR video games, and as such are outside the scope of this blog.
Suffice to say that only part of that (metaphorically) blinding (metaphorical) sweat/tic combo is due to my poor lying-to-you skills — the other half is due to my work flying off the proverbial handle.
Historically, when Video Games become a necessary source of order and sanity in this crazy world, I have turned to the largest, deepest, driest games I can find. Morrowind got me through a rough winter at school (and a breakup), Fallout (1 and 2) kept me sane through a rocky transitional period, and Rome: Total War helped me make it to graduation.
So, seeing as I’m already halfway(?) through Dragon Age, you’d think I’d be questing long into the night. Well, here is (are) the problem(s): I’m tired at night these days. I don’t have the blocks of multiple hours that are required to sink back into the groove of knowing who’s equipped with what and what my hotkeys are and how my five layers of tactic slots translate into how to keep my mage from being immediately fricaseed by angry Darkspawn™.
Instead, I’ve been turning in the exact opposite direction: the far reaches of Space. Crazy Space. Mario Galaxy Space.
In Memoriam: Glen W. Bell Jr.
Well, I hadn’t planned to hit you with a one-two JUNK FOOD PUNCH during these tender, formative blog days, but sometimes Fate intervenes.
Last night I was perusing Google News and happened to glance at the In The News box section — a quick list of 9 people or entities that Google decides are really happening right now. Jay Leno, Tonight Show, Barack Obama, Heidi Montag — you know, the usual. But right under Jay Leno, I saw it. Taco Bell.
Why the heck would Taco Bell make headlines? The usual answer would be that some sort of vermin was found in the back, or that someone found a toe in their nachos. But alas, the newsworthy reason is much more somber.
Ladies and gentlemen: Glen W. Bell Jr., founder of Taco Bell, has passed on.
This naturally meant two visits were in order: to Wikipedia, and then Taco Bell (not necessarily in that order). Read on!
