In about 10 minutes or so, I’m going to be up in front of a class talking about couch potatoes in space.

It’s a game. It’s for a grade. I brought real potatoes as visual aids. I also brought a rutabaga.

This will be the best Christmas ever.

Edit: I made it through, rutabaga and all. I even got a certificate for my troubles.

Now I gotta remind myself of why I did this class in the first place. That might take me a while. If I seem stupid, you’ll know why.

Edit 2: After riding around face down on my front passenger seat for a day, my certificate went into the cardboard box on the tall shelf near my breakfast nook. The box where I keep my Shadowbane strategy guides. Seems a safe enough place for it.

Still feeling stupid. Taquitos and mango salsa did nothing.

Like Lum said, this movie is probably best enjoyed drunk. Not quite the Rocky Horror replacement some have gushed about, but once you get past the first half hour, it’s all good. And David Koechner needs to be the new comedy sidekick for every movie made from now on. Better him than anyone else.

If you’re going to be drunk at a movie, best do it at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. Oh yeah, they’re ready for it this year. They’re playing the winners from their Blanks on a Blank promotion in the opening attractions along with the one for Airport 1975 (and no, I didn’t realize Airplane! was spoofing a particular movie either.)

But for the real reason to go to the Alamo, click below and go buy a bucket of what you see.

Continue reading Yes, they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in heyall!…

One of the great cartoon/video game villain voices is now silenced. This guy was everything from Megabyte on Reboot to Mutant Bob on Fallout.

OK, it’s not quite Gamasutra, rather it’s an education-themed subsite, with the first new Student Soapbox since it launched: Out of School.

This means you. Yes. And when you are done reading, tell me what you think. Use small words so I understand.

On my way to the open house this morning, I stopped to have breakfast migas (pretty much an omelet if you speak Mexican, with potatoes and tortillas) at Taco XPress, on the next-to-last day at the original location on South Lamar. Today, it’ll be an all-day party while the big movers raze the funky old shack down. Some time later, it’ll be moving in next door to the Walgreens building a parking lot on the old stand.

They were good migas.

I’ll be at the ACC video game open house on Saturday morning. It’s right before my class, in the same building. Just means I need to hustle to get laundry done this morning so I can hit the road for Austin and get my homework done without so many distractions.

This is what my thinking has become. Used to be I could figure out a way to say something I cared about because so little of it had been said before. No, that’s not true; I used to hem and haw about every little sentence and just pretend it was original. No, I didn’t do that either.

There’s a big green paperback book that will probably disintegrate within a year if I bother to keep reading it. It sits in my tiny living room near the door to the outside. I walked right past it for a week plus, and no one cared. Would it make a difference if I said it was my class textbook, and I have a final due the week after next, that I really should get back to work on?

No, probably not. And this is where I revisit the notion of why I signed up for it in the first place. Was it because I thought I’d learn something new? Was it because I thought it was worth knowing? Did I care about learning to create something I could care about? Or was it just base emotions like jealousy, arrogance, selfishness, boredom or curiosity? Did I ever think about it before I started? Do I have a good reason to take the next class in the series?

I’m sure there’s a “yes” in there to some of that. At least one. But that’s all I’m sure of. All I did was create one more really interesting thing I really don’t like thinking about, that became a roadblock for every other train of thought.

Some people get drunk when they feel this way. I wish I knew what they knew.

Two Gamasutra reports in a month. If I did 10 more a month for them, I could probably live on it (plus it’d break their bank.) This one is also the second in a row where I successfully finagled a song title as my headline. Bloo has some other panel coverage that’s worth noting, and Evan Van Zelfden did a bunch of interviews.

It was a well-done con. Joe Ybarra’s comments echo my own thoughts about the caliber of people there. It’ll be worth going to if the standards are held high. So long as people keep their sense of entitlement in check, it’ll be substantial.