A picture is worth a thousand words

This was my weekend!

Friday's ElectricLunch Hour - Criminal Edition

Haven't heard it in ages so I felt like it, and found this pretty nifty video someone made for it :)

Enjoy!

Crunch time

One thing is absolutely certain, my vacation is over. In the three days since my return to business-as-usual I've gotten up earlier than ever because I had to help out my ex with our boys who crashed at my place on Monday night after their karate session, taken my drumkit apart in preparation of an eventual band project (I has one), gotten on top of my work (one good thing of taking three weeks vacation, people have no choice to cover for you and when you come back it's not so bad; I've had worse returns after only one week), and practiced drums with the drumline. And this is far from over because we are now just over three weeks before The Big Show.

We've now gone from one rehearsal every two weeks to every week, with two weekend events planned on top of it. The last and obvious one is the general rehearsal for the show with all the participants basically to setup the stage positions and a quick run-through, but the most important one will be happening this weekend is what we lovingly call the Death Camp. Two days of nothing but cleaning and refining the six tunes the drumline will be playing on, including a totally kick-ass drum feature. It was supposed to be written simple to be learned quickly, but Michel Pilon, who's been a drumline head instructor at the highest level of the sport, and knowing he was dealing with a bunch of DCI vets (me excluded), couldn't help but throw a few curve balls. He also helped Wishmaster's drummer to build his drum solo so it fits seamlessly in what will become a true drumgasm!

With all the drumming, studying and rehearsing I have to do, all games are going on the back burner. Of course, when one has been a gamer for as long as I have, "One does not simply stop gaming" as the meme goes. I will still log onto EVE for skill flipping and maybe some quick romps through space. I will probably shoot stuff and/or explore places in various other games I play because you can only look at little black dots while listening to a click track for a certain amount of time. The Wishmaster OES 2012 event will be happening on October 20th, and I will be taking a few days off work right after so I can cool down and game like I haven't gamed in a long time.

Let's make this show awesome :)

o7

Friday's Electric Lunch Hour - Spacey Edition

Last Tuesday I got to see Mr Vai in action, and let me tell you, I'm still slightly radioactive from his powerful electric guitar antics! He even joked about this himself as he told a young girl who got on stage for the audience participation bit of his show by telling her "you might want to step away from my amps if you want to have children someday XD". All in all it was an awesome performance, with a lot of humor in it - It shows that Steve went to the Frank Zappa School of Hard Knocks!

Apart from that I'm slowly coming to terms with the sad fact that my vacation is almost over, and Monday will be the return to harsh reality. I am also less than one month away from the big Wishmaster event and this week we even got the thumbs up from Nightwish! You see they were also in town this week and the Wishmaster band members and a few members of the drumline were attending, and some of 'em were crazy/hardcore enough to wait just outside the tour bus to meet Tuomas Holopainen and Marco Hietala. Yes Montreal is great like that :)

So for the next few weeks I have to concentrate on a lot of drumming as we'll get into the clean-up part of our rehearsals and next weekend is our Death Camp, a drum corps style camp of musical immersion. Should be epic. And of course I'm already thinking about the break I'll take right after the show: I will be taking at least the Monday and Tuesday off (maybe even the entire week, because I can) and will do an EVE Orgy. We will decide what we'll do with Chez Stan and where. I cannot wait :)

Fly loud!

o7

Black Mesa

This is totally safe... no worries, I got this!

In 1998 a small game called Half-Life by a small company called Valve took the gaming world by its balls and made it cry "uncle". A nerdy goatee'd scientist called Gordon Freeman became a legend overnight as he clawed his way through the massive Black Mesa Research Facility after an incident called a "resonance cascade" linked our world to a world called Xen and started spawning hordes of bad critters. As if that wasn't enough, when the "help" arrived bullets started flying everywhere and everything was a gigantic mess. And a G-man by the name of Tarquin Smith - who we now know to be a Jovian agent - took control of Gordon's life just when he thought the ordeal was over.

Fast forward to 2004. Tarquin woke up Gordon and sent him to some eastern bloc hell-town now overrun by some extra-terrestrial faction called the Combine for another bullet storm and awesome adventure. To say that the Half-Life games are good is an understatement on the cosmic scale. They brought gaming to what it is today, that is to say as big, if not bigger than the movie industry.

Fast forward to 5 days ago. A small team called Black Mesa Modification Project released the result of a massive task. Black Mesa is basically the original Half-Life game but as opposed to Valve's own Half-Life Source, it uses all of the Source engine's bells and whistles to give the classic game a very modern look. And the result is as brilliant as the original. The beginning will still make you shit bricks and you WILL pray to whatever you believe is holy to find your crowbar and your first Glock.

Do yourselves a favor and download Black Mesa. You will not be disappointed!

o7