Since I was in my mid-20s when Pokémon was created, I never really “got” it. The only thing I knew about it was the whole seizure thing. But then I had kids. Just before he turned 4, my son went through a brief-but-intense phase of obsession with the Pokémon cartoons and toys just before he discovered Mario and the video game floodgates opened, leaving all past obsessions (Thomas, Star Wars, etc.) in the dust (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor).

So as the video game thing took off, I bought him Pokémon FireRed for the Game Boy Advance, thinking I could tap into his pre-video game interest. I vaguely knew that the games were RPG-style, but I didn’t make the connection that, unlike in many games, where there’s reading but it’s fairly inconsequential, in a Pokémon game it is absolutely essential that you be able to read in order to play. Since my son’s still a pre-schooler, that didn’t work out so well. Read more »

I didn’t play many console video games between outgrowing my Atari 2600 in high school (while I would visit friends’ houses for regular reminders of how much I sucked at newer games on their NESes) and getting my GameCube in 2003, but since then I’ve had a bit of a renaissance and am a lot better at these games than I used to be.

But I will never be great at Super Metroid. In particular, I cannot for the life of me get the timing right for wall jumps in that game. I’ve been able to do them on occasion, but it’s just been luck.

Now my son is playing it (on the Wii) and he seems to be drawn like a magnet to the spot where you have to wall jump to get out of a deep shaft. (The spot where the native creatures “teach” you the wall jump.) And then he wants me to help him. Good luck with that! Read more »

I’ve updated my Bands page with a video clip of Dream Out Loud performing “Hope” at Breakers Music Hall on May 2, 2002.

Here’s the video…

That’s me standing stiffly stage left and playing my beloved (and former) aquamarine metallic Fender American Jazz Bass V. (Well, I do miss it, but I certainly can’t complain about the translucent orange Music Man StingRay 5 I bought to replace it.)

Note: This video requires QuickTime.

Shockingly lame, mildly offensive (probably moreso if you’re Native American), yet hilariously ill-conceived and even more hilariously ill-executed, we have this music video for a disco-fied version of the oft-covered surf rock hit “Apache.”

I can’t make out the name of the band written on the bass drum head, and it doesn’t seem to match any listed here.

Although I will never recover the precious minutes of my life wasted watching this, and I may never even know the name of the band (so I can take care to avoid them in the future), at least one good thing came of this: my discovery of the Second Hand Songs site, which is actually a pretty cool idea!

Update (September 29, 2006): I guess I should’ve just checked Google Video… there, we have the song identified as the work of the Tommy Seebach Band.

First, a qualification: Since I got a flat-panel display at work, I no longer have my PC connected directly to the display; I view the PC’s video output via Remote Desktop Connection on my Mac. I’ve learned over time that RDC does not provide a direct, unaltered feed of the PC’s video. For understandable reasons (faster screen refresh), but by perhaps unjustifiable methods, RDC re-renders parts of the video display. The result is that you do not see a pixel-perfect (or even simply downsampled) representation of the actual PC video; it appears to be redrawn completely for network transmission.

In particular, this does funky things with Internet Explorer’s output. Last year I spent a few hours trying to figure out why borders around my buttons were extending by one pixel both down and to the right, until I realized that on the actual PC’s display this wasn’t happening… it was just an RDC quirk.

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