Because I am bad at scheduling my life, the interview with Wilder was post-poned to accomodate a prior engagement: crafts and music at the Doug Fir Lounge. Angela works with a girl involved in a small crafting-collective who have just released a 300 page book of DIY craft projects, and as part of the release they staged an event at Doug Fir. Bands, some sort of I-think-it’s-performance-art appearance by AC [something], eBay Powerseller. I’m not entirely sure about the details.

We showed up, had some food in the not-so-crowded upstairs lounge, Angela said hello to the girl she knows, and we watched a three-piece band named Millions of Birds play a set. Keyboards, drums, guitarist/effectsnerd, with the keyboardist singing some of the time. Good, but sort of sedate — nothing to end up whistling after, more music than “songs.” Certainly worth the free cover, though.

And I spent about four and a half hours playing Shadow of the Colossus yesterday (which experience was made possible, on release day and without a pre-order, by my man on the inside — Nick, I salute you). And it is good. The game is, so far, as advertised: travel via horseback across an expansive and beautiful (but deserted) landscape, and engage in epic fights with various Colossi.

And it’s really, really epic. They have done something with this game that borders more closely to art than video games usually get. These Colossi, as strange hybrids of stone and fur and animation, are convincingly huge and powerful to a degree that embarasses most if not all “big boss” fights I’ve ever played. The scope of the monsters is stunning. The battles are more a matter of problem-solving and navigation than typical button-mashing attack-and-retreat combat — the Colossi are not just in the arena, they are the arena.

The effect of these huge fights is wonderful, and justifies what is otherwise an almost unforgivable lack of traditional gameplay: you’re just fighting the bosses. Ride around on your horse until you find the location. Climb around the location until you find the Colossus. Fight the Colossus until it dies. Repeat. It’s unusual; it’s even unusual compared to the spiritual parent, Ico, where there was at least a sense of constant tension throughout the levels as you balanced your navigation of the Castle with your need to protect the Girl from recurring shadow-monsters. There is none of that (so far, at least) in Shadow of the Colossus — just a series of quiet journeys punctuated by stupefyingly out-scaled battles.

It’s really great.

Fun fact: toast does not do well in the rain.

Ever since the band broke up, I’ve been out of contact with bassist and long-time friend Wilder Schmaltz. It’s not any expression of ire or bitterness; I’ve just been sort of letting things sit, waiting for a reason to give him a call.

Also ever since the breakup, I have been tossing around the idea of a documentary (originally suggested, as it happens, by Wilder) about the band, or about the breakup, or about the general notion of band breakups or perhaps simply about bands. Thesis indeterminate, but certainly a band-related documentary. I have a camera, I have a couple mics, I have the software and the hardware to edit a zero-budget film. I just haven’t been starting.

So I am trying to take two birds with one stone. I just called Wilder, engaged in a little “boy it’s been a while” chatter — he’s moving! he’s been dorking about with friendster! — and then told him I wanted to make him my first interview for the documentary. Tentative plan: tomorrow night, his place.

He is, I think, a low-risk first interview, insofar as he’s photogenic, likes to talk, and almost certainly won’t punch me in the face no matter what I ask him.

When I left for work I thought that I had the whole site up and running in a manner that, while far from perfect, was at least adequate. Functional. Lo, my dismay: when I went to make the first welcoming post featured below this one, I was met ultimately with an unpleasant message:

500 Internal Server Error

For whatever (probably diligent and wholly security-minded) reason, my place of occupation does not permit SSH connections. So no shell into the server for Josh. So no fixing the problem. So eight torturous hours of ignoring some glaring and site-paralyzing bug preventing me from making that cathartic First Post to justify the long weekend spent coding and debugging and cursing and annoying my wife.

It was a pretty stupid bug, too. Not even a bug. A permissions issue. A minor oversight in the workflow of a utility script that, in theory, I’ll never even have to run again.

It’s fixed now, though, because (and this is one of the key lessons I have learned as a programmer, one of those truisms of coding that should be written in a tiny black notebook of programmatical koans to be pondered by students of the arcane arts) at some point I will again run that script that I think I’ll never have to run again.

Anyway, welcome to the site. Soon, I can bury all this ridiculous “the site is new” omphalaskepsis in actual posts about actual things.

After a week or so of effort, and especially a weekend of css tweaking and perl hacking (the spine of my aging copy of the Perl Cookbook having been left that much weaker, the pages that much more fatigued), the site is now in functional form.

Considering my penchant for starting projects that I don’t finish, I feel pretty good about what I’ve gotten done.

More work to do, though — the css could use some further tweaking, and the files need some cleanup and re-organization regardless. If you want to peek at the current mess, here it is. I also need to get an rss feed worked up for this thing, I suppose.

Oh, and content. I should probably add some content.

-j