F E B R U A R Y 0 4
Ferenczy rates his life according to giraffes. Dave begins working at Imagine Design. Reactions to Janet Jackson's Superbowl stunt. Why Baltimore City Public Schools are crappy. Stories about Snakebusters and escaping parking garages.
Bowling, Video Games, And Music, I'm An All-Around Reviewer...
This here post is live from Baltimore, the city that can't take care of its children. Although we devoted teachers must struggle through the stress of these difficult times, we do manage to have some fun. Yesterday for example, I went to lunch at about 2:00 PM and started drinking some beers, maintining my low-level buzz until 2:00 AM. I forget the name of the restaurant, but it's right next to Timothy's down in Fell's Point, and it was excellent. It's got a ship captains theme, and if you're looking for a moderately inexpensive meal with large excellent-tasting portions, that's the place for you. After lunch, I played a little NHL 2K4 on Gamecube. Great game. You get to manage the team as the General Manager, set the finances, draft players, sign free agents, trade players and even play the ultra-realistic hockey games. If I had a rating system developed for video games, I would give this game seven giraffes and a hippo out of a possible eight giraffes. Later on last night, I went Duck pin bowling with Tammer and Andrew Newman and others at the Patterson Bowling Center. I give this place 6 giraffes. Friendly service, plus duck pin bowling is fun. The best part is that it's BYOB. After that, I got a call from a friend from college, Eric. He was at Fletcher's to watch his friend play in his hard rock/new metal band. Fletcher's is a bar a lot like the Brass Monkey, except the bands are better, the bar is bigger, cleaner and nicer, and the attendees seem to be younger. There were definietly some youngins there. From what I hear, it was over/under night or something. Anyway, the point is that Eric's friend was the lead singer for a band called Anamide (insideanamide.com). This band is a hard rock/new metal type band. They are not death metal, and luckily they're nothing like let it die. I'd compare them more to Nine Inch Nails, perhaps a less upset Alice in Chains or sort of like a less hard Limp Bizkit with a better lead vocalist and no super wierd bass player. Actually, the real truth is somewhere in between those bands. I'm not real familiar with the genre, and personally not that big of a fan of the genre, but I was impressed with Anamide. The guitarist, bassist and drummer were all technically very good instrumentalists, the lead singer had a lot of energy and a pretty good voice, although his mic was turned down too low (Fletcher's fault, not the band's). The songs were pretty good. I was bopping around a little, even though it's not my kind of music. My favorite song was "halo," the requisite song about how an ex-girlfriend screwed over the lead singer and now he's bitter. What makes or breaks this type of song is the music, and the music was good. I give Anamide 5 monkeys and a duck-billed platypus. Anyway, that's enough rambling for me. I'm out like the Killa Bees on bail...
Sunday, February 29 at 8:16 AM
Neapolitan? I Call It Choc Van Straw
I had a great 24th birthday - but why should I talk about it when I can show it to you?
Click here to see a short movie (Quicktime required).
Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday wishes. (Note: Because of large file sizes and bandwidth issues, this movie has been replaced with the current Okay Samurai movie. Please use the mailbox section to request old movies to be sent to you via email.))
Saturday, February 28 at 9:37 PM
That Girl's Got Issues Like National Geographic
What's the difference between an art director and a designer? The lines seem to get blurrier every day, but let me try to explain to the best of my knowledge right now. Let's say we're working on a new line of Lego roller coasters. Kids get to make all sorts of awesome coasters in several different sets. One twists around and through a jurassic-era volcano (look out for the remote controlled T-Rex chomp), one sends abandoned mine carts leaping over chasms (packed with plenty of collapsable items for spectacular crashes), and one is a spaceship ride through an uncharted planet (featuring a glow-in-the-dark track and gravity-defying loops). They all come standard with sensor-activated passenger screaming noises, and can be connected together to form the ultimate ride.
Designers are the ones who get in there and do the dirty work, but it's fun dirty work. Concept artists have drawn the preliminary sketches for what these pieces could look like. Product designers will decide what existing blocks will be used and what new ones need to be made. Package designers will create the giant yellow boxes that kids will immediately grab. Graphic designers might make the instruction booklet or create the print ad for Nickelodeon Magazine. The Art Director is the person who is responsible for the cohesive vision behind the Lego roller coaster line, so Art Direction is mainly concerned with the initial idea and the advertising side of things. How will this product be perceived by the public? He or she decides to run with the theme that these sets will widen Lego's age appeal - we'll show television, magazine, and billboard ads with renowned architects creating their own imaginative masterpieces using the exact same blocks available to the consumers. The Art Director works with everyone from the photographers to the writers to make sure this message is heard clearly and unifies the three sets.
I've been going through a tough decision lately - by the end of this quarter, I need to decide if I want to be a Designer or Art Director...and it's looking like Art Direction. To me, the ideas are the most exciting part of the creative process. I had fun coming up with those Lego sets, but then when I had to explain how they were made, I started to lose interest and just write crap. Granted, my take on Lego Art Direction is probably way off the mark about how things work in the real world, but you get the basic picture. Art Direction = ideas. Design = art.
Haven't checked Shoot or the Portfolio in a while? By all means, Czech Republic.
Wednesday, February 25 at 8:08 PM
In With The Outro And Out With The Old
I started a new part-time job yesterday, working as the assistant to the Creative Director at Imagine Design. It's a small company whose past clients include UPS, Mercedes-Benz and the American Cancer Society. The job was inherited from an upper quarter PC student who is helping me learn the ropes. I help with everyday tasks like paying bills, picking up dry cleaning and buying lightbulbs. But there's also a design element; yesterday I spent the majority of the time working on sketches of lighthouses for a charity logo. It's a welcome break from school and a real world application of the methods learned in class. I'll probably be working two days a week from 12-5, so it's not too overwhelming, and balancing out schoolwork won't be much of a problem. Financially, I knew I needed a job for a while, but retail or waiting tables never really excited me...I feel very fortunate to have been given this opportunity.
Tuesday, February 24 at 10:38 AM
From Neutral To Fifth
As you may be able to tell from the lack of updates recently, schoolwork is kicking in. Two more weeks of classes, then studio week, then critiques. The projects from this quarter are shaping up to be more in-depth than the last. I've got a series of 10 postcards for a local music store, a personalized color swatch index, unique CD packaging, a speech poster, dolphin jambalaya (just making sure you were still paying attention), a poster for CERN in Geneva, a photography collection, a vector art Okay Samurai Multimedia poster, an OKSMM bifold card, and several projects based on the artist Rene Magritte: a logo, letterhead, envelope, business card, and video game. Unfortunately, this leaves little time to do much else - the demo suffering the most. On the plus side, I was allowed to do my demo packaging as the unique CD packaging project, so I'm still making progress. My best guess now is that I'll finish things up at the end of March. But I did get to turn up the electric guitar Tuesday night with three other PC guys. We played inside the school after they locked up - which meant volume control went out the window.
Brian Shea gave Okay Samurai some California love on his new blog, howleysurfer. Brian and I were recently reminiscing about the daily trouble we caused in our 12th grade calculus class. He's an avid surfer and all-around great guy, so check his site out when you get the chance.
I've decided to have a small birthday party this upcoming Friday night from 9 to 11. We'll be making ice cream sundaes and playing apartment miniature golf...what did you expect?
Friday, February 20 at 5:06 PM
Eugene Sat Next To Becky Mallory
Brian Shea, yes, the Brian Shea from Mrs. Jurinski's 12th grade calculus class, told me yesterday to check out presidentmatch.com. You answer questions about how you feel on everyday issues, and the presidential candidates are ranked according to your stances. For me, Kerry was 84%, Bush was 15%, but I got an 100% match with Kucinich, baby. Try it.
Beyond Good And Evil is an excellent video game. It sold horribly on all three home systems over the holidays, forcing Ubisoft to drop the price to $19.99. Having read positive reviews and armed with a Valentine's Day Best Buy gift card, I decided to check it out. You play as a female reporter named Jade, who discovers a government conspiracy that's basically faking a war. Although there's a lot of kung-fu-esque fighting with a staff, your camera is the main weapon. Pictures you take to expose the truth help start a rebellion. It plays like a more mature, sci-fi Zelda.
Wednesday, February 18 at 8:24 PM
The Great Parking Garage Escape
Turned out to be quite the entertaining weekend. I saw Teitur in concert at Eddie's Attic, watched inebriated friends dance at the Lava Lounge, and had a late Valentine's Day dinner at the Waffle House (Did you know that at some Waffle House opening ceremonies, they ceremonially drop the 24-hour restaurant's key into the trash?). One highlight of this weekend was getting out of the parking garage on Friday night; let's just say that my favorite space on Monopoly boards is free parking.
And that reminds me of the greatest parking garage escape ever - when the band saw Kula Shaker at the 9:30 Club in high school. After being asked "Hey white boys, you want some weed?" when we took a wrong turn after a metro stop, we got back from the concert late and found our parking garage closed. There were steel gates that blocked off every possible entry or exit - except for one in the back. Andrew and Don went inside and got stopped by a night watchman, but they somehow finessed their way out of getting in trouble. They found our 1986 Civic and drove it out of the exit undetected. Then I took the wheel and we ended up clearing a sidewalk and small grassy field to reach the main road. There were no damages and we laughed the entire way home.
Sunday, February 15 at 8:27 AM
Who Invited Cydonia Mensae?
All this landing on Mars stuff is great. I took two semesters of Astronomy in college, so that makes me an expert on space exploration (math/science credits don't write themselves, and UVA only lets you take Physics: How Things Work twice). I had a dream last night about flying spaceships through a massive forested planet with vertical rock formations that cut through the sky - probably had something to do with Chips Ahoy! after midnight. Or hitting my head on the ceiling fan yesterday. Got a little carried away playing Paula Abdul on guitar...oh yeah right, like you've never done that before.
All we're seeing on the news about Mars are rocks. Awesome crimson space rocks, but rocks nevertheless. But an atlas of the planet shows you the bigger picture. Olympus Mons is the biggest volcano in the solar system - all the Hawaiian islands could fit inside of it. Valles Marineris is a canyon that spans 20% of the planet and can be up to 4 miles deep. It's cool to think that future generations could be snowboarding down Olympus Mons or making crappy Chili's commercials with echoes in Valles Marineris. A girl can dream.
Looking ahead, missions scheduled to launch in 2011 will begin testing procedures to get humans on Mars. With most of earth explored, except for some underwater regions and that secret invisible island of midget sushi chefs at 20° 57'N, space travel marks the new age of exploration. There are billions of galaxies like ours, so the chances of eventually finding unimaginable planets with completely new landscapes are fairly good. What could be more exciting than that? Okay, I'll give you playing multipuck air hockey with Ving Rhames, but interplanetary exploration is a close second.
Thursday, February 12 at 7:03 PM
BCPS, Or Why I Moved To Atlanta
Great education is such a necessary role in becoming an independent, free-thinking individual. If you read what I went through last year in the TFA Chronicles, you know that my teaching environment was completely counterproductive to learning. When my principal's response to students playing tag in the freakin' ceiling was "that's just the way kids are," you start to wonder where all this incredible education funding promised by politicians is going. Not Baltimore City Schools, because they're a whopping $58 million in debt. How? No one knows. The previous CEO stepped down last year, and rumblings of scandal and wrongdoings have always been present. To put things in perspective, in 2002, 36 BCPS staff members made six figure salaries. Of course, none of them were teachers or principals. But the ex-CEO's driver made $101,000. Just a few miles away, Baltimore County's superintendent doesn't even have a driver.
According to the Baltimore Sun, 800 people have been laid off already this year, and 1,200 or more will be laid off by March 1 if the system doesn't find a solution. The teachers voted last week on the BCPS-proposed solutions: take a 6.8 percent pay cut, eight furlough days, or neither...and surprise, neither won. Yeah, the system is $58 million in debt from corruption or driver salaries or whatever, and the teachers are the ones losing jobs and money. With a system of 96,000 students, BCPS is doing everything they can to sabotage these kids' chances for success. Forget test scores as a measure of competency - numbers can be faked and assessments can be retaken. At a school board meeting last night, the current CEO cried, a proposal to investigate criminal activity by past administrations was shot down, and police locked the doors due to an enormous crowd of angry demonstrators.
Look, there's no easy solution to this. Fingers will continue to be pointed, excuses will be made, and teachers will continue to be disrespected while thousands of children get an inadequate education. No Child Left Behind? Try 96,000.
Tuesday, February 10 at 9:36 PM
Ecto Cooler Is Refreshment, Perfected
There was a time in second grade where the girls in my class decided they would all pretend to be snakes. Why snakes? No idea. At recess, they chased the boys, making hissing noises with their tongues. My friends Robert, Tony, and I fought back by creating "Snakebusters" (during the height of the two Ghostbusters cartoon shows...remember the knockoff with the gorilla and Prime Evil?). We made proton packs out of yarn and construction paper to help us battle the girls while chanting "I ain't afraid of no snakes!"
This leads us into the story of the most epic boys vs. girls battle I ever encountered. The girls claimed a hilltop jungle gym as their base and used it as a jail for captured boys. Robert got caught early one day, so Tony and I tried to figure out a plan to rescue him. With only three girls guarding the jail, our chances of breaking Robert out were good. While Tony kept lookout at the bottom of the hill, I charged the hissing snake girls and shot them with my plasma beams (in the form of bright pink yarn). They gave up quickly and I rescued Robert almost too easily...then I heard Tony yelling. I whirled around to see him running uphill, screaming something about reinforcements. About 25 girls abruptly appeared behind Tony, running at full speed with Braveheart-esque vengeance in their eyes. We were completely outnumbered and all three of us got captured. I remember thinking that it was a sad day for Snakebusters. We eventually won the war when the girls dropped the snake personas, but the only day I remember was our crushing defeat. The look on Tony's face is etched into my memory: the heart-stopping fear of knowing that he would get caught, mixed with an equal amount of satisfaction in getting 25 girls to chase him.
I am working hard to get ahead with schoolwork in order to finish the final demo song this weekend. I've started thinking of possibly using a stage name as well. I mean, I love my name, but I'm not sure how catchy and rockstar-ish it sounds. The name floating in my head right now is Patrick Graham - two separate names that people say fit me well. I also like Cameron, Damon, Devon, and Foster. If you have any ideas, please send them my way.
Monday, February 9 at 2:53 PM
Say Me Too, Vote For Neetu
Jeff and I visited a 24-hour Kroger grocery store late Friday night. We were both starving after suffering through some local bands (the Hot Young Priests were, unfortunately, not flammable adolescent clergymen). Jeff had his heart set on a deep-dish pizza, but when he scanned the treat in the self-checkout line, he got overcharged and stuck with a PLEASE WAIT screen. Apparently the people next to us had the same problem, because they just gave up, put cash on the counter, and walked out. Jeff thought that pressing the help button 57 times would do the trick, but the understaffed store never answered his pleas. He eventually tracked down an employee, and they walked back to the frozen foods to find the real advertised price. The employee ended up ripping the sale sign off of the door to take to the sole cashier. Everyone in the store was either A) old and spooky, B) intoxicated, or C) me. We finally left, only to realize that the deep-dish pizza would take an unprecedented 70 minutes to heat up. I think I'll stick to daytime groceries from now on. I'm all about those 2 for $4 sales and buying the cheap knockoffs of name brands.
Rei Inamoto spoke at school on Friday. His company is doing some cool things with interactive media - he guided us through the creative process of sites like nikelab.com.
Sunday, February 8 at 9:43 PM
Seems So Out Of Context In This Gaudy Apartment Complex
In Typography II, we have to take a speech and create a 30x40 poster using only type to depict the tone and message of the speaker. Immediately, Jeff and I both thought of Conan O'Brien's Harvard Commencement speech. Jeff graciously backed down and chose Will Ferrell's Harvard Commencement speech instead. If you've never read them, definitely check them out: you can read Conan's speech here and Will's speech here.
I made a small update to Shoot today for my photography class, and will add a new shot every week for the rest of the quarter. It's exciting to not settle with liking just one thing here at school. Photography, writing, illustration, webpage design, print ad design, 3D and motion graphics - everything is extremely interesting and challenging, and there are opportunities to explore it all.
Thursday, February 5 at 9:00 PM
"AND IN LABS!" Gatorade, Please Decapitate Your Creative Director.
The game was better than the ads this year. I attended the Creativity Atlanta Ad Critique at Gordon Biersch with Katie, Howard, Josh and Matt yesterday night. The three judges and the ref set an extremely slow pace, so I actually felt I got more out of the event from just talking to my PC friends. Budweiser's wannabe-clydesdale donkey, the NFL "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow" medley, and Chevy's soap-in-mouth kids all seemed to get the best reception. I enjoyed the simplicity and style of the Monster.com ad where the potential worker and the boss shared similar lifestyles. Staples' office supply mafia, Bud Light's beer-fetching dogs and Fed Ex's alien were pretty funny too.
But some ads were so bad that (in the words of Andrew) they made you want to rush out and buy the competitor's product. Buy Pringles, because Lay's Potato Chips had two elderly people going through every cliche possible to get their bag o' chips. Buy Shick, because Gillette's forced "yeah!" following their awkward descriptions of what it takes to be a man was laughably horrendous. And I agree with Ferenczy - if you're getting upset about Janet's stunt, get upset about Cialis and Levitra too, because their ads took the definition of craptastic to new, uber-craptastic heights. Mike Ditka using football and baseball as a sexual metaphor isn't exactly my idea of family-friendly.
Tuesday, February 3 at 9:46 PM
More Offensive Than Janet's Right Breast
The Superbowl halftime show is a huge entertainment event. Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, even called it a "sacred time." Now everyone is complaining about Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Granted, if I were a parent, I would have been upset about the halftime show's sexual content, but as a parent with a remote control and free will, I would have changed the channel a long time before my kids saw JJ's nipple ring. People were basically having sex on stage before that little (big?) event. It was pehaps indecent, definitely shocking, but not really different from what was already happening during the show. What I don't get is that no one sees the real outrage of the show, and it wasn't sexual at all. The most offensive thing I saw all night was Kid Rock, whom I happen to like, wearing an American Flag. Not only was he wearing it, but he had cut a hole in the middle for his head to go through. He desecrated the American Flag and wore it as a garment, even though there are rules as to how one should display the Flag. I don't think he did it to desecrate the Flag on purpose, because when he took it off, it there was someone there to take it so it wouldn't touch the ground, but the fact remains that he (or a wardrobe designer) cut a hole in it. What I don't understand is why no one is saying anything about that.
Just my $0.02...
at 6:22 PM
Henshin A Go-Go, Baby
After setting it aside since winter break, I finally beat Viewtiful Joe this morning. What an freakin' awesome game. It's got all the elements of an old-school Nintendo cartridge - huge bosses with patterns to figure out, long levels packed with tons of enemies, and controller-throwing difficulty. Slowing down or speeding up time alters the fighting, so you can do things like punch bullets back at massive helicopters. In the last boss battle, you get inside your giant robot Six Majin and fight another giant robot on top of the earth, all while an enormous spaceship in the background scorches the planet with lasers and small spaceships zoom in and out, trying to crash into you. I said "cool" out loud so many times; it reminded me of (literally) hundreds of games that Andrew and I played growing up. And it's all 2D!
In the lucrative video game console wars, Nintendo's Gamecube is trailing behind Sony's Playstation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. When the next batch of systems comes out in 2005, Nintendo is going to have a tough time getting respectable numbers; many think the next system will be the last, and then Nintendo will make software for all systems (an idea I like). The hardware of these systems is getting to the point where differences are negligible...there are no more "Mode 7" or "Blast Processing" buzzwords like the 16-bit era. Most people won't get a chance to play Viewtiful Joe or other near-perfect Gamecube exclusives like Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime, even with the recent GC price cuts. Games are typically hitting the shelves at $49.99 now, but if you wait six months to a year, the price always goes down to at least $29.99 (and buying "used and new" from Amazon.com is usually cheaper too). I remember that I HAD to be the first kid on the block to own a game in the Super NES days, but now that I'm unemployed in grad school, I can definitely wait.
It's February! Jeff Chin made the magazine cover an image map, so clicking on a headline should take you right to the story. I'll write on Wednesday about the Superbowl Ad Critique, and a new Shoot from my photography class will be up on Friday. Realistically, I've realized that there's no way I'll be able to get this demo done in time to play a show by the end of the month, so the new goal is to just finish the recording and packaging by my birthday instead.
Sunday, February 1 at 10:38 AM
Okay Samurai Multimedia is Dave Werner's personal site. I'm currently working at Minor Studios in San Francisco. Thanks for visiting! (more...)
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