Yesterday was certainly one of the strangest days in recent memory, likely due to the fact that I, in a rare move against my antisocial tendencies, decided to go out. I presented my game Spaceratops to the Music Technology open house, where people who were considering joining the program came and checked out everyone’s projects from the past year. There were also a lot of people there who weren’t considering, but were just acquainted with somebody in the program and came to see cool stuff. So I had a more or less constant stream of people coming up to talk to me about my game. It was the only game at the open house, and the one that arguably had the least to do with “music technology”. But there were middle school kids (one of whom became seriously addicted to Spaceratops and played it three times), a guy with a Kraftwerk shirt, a lot of potential grad students, and a lot of people who heard from someone else that there was “someone around here who’s into chiptune” (me) and could not wait to talk to me about how Anamanaguchi went to NYU. But everybody seemed to really like the game. I didn’t know that there were any type of awards given out, but I ended up winning the award for the best undergraduate presentation (!!) to my complete surprise. I was blushing like a fool, I’m sure. But I got to plug my website a lot, and I made a lot of connections.
The other thing that happened was that I went to my first Big Ups performance last night at National Underground, and it was everything I expected and more. Big Ups are a punk band who are all juniors or seniors in music tech, and they put on crazy shows. During the second song, the singer, Joe, climbed up on this table that was out in the audience and wrapped his leg around one of the big columns that was holding it up. And of course he fell, knocking over a bunch of glasses and cutting his hand open. He rubbed the blood all over his face, it was awesome. Also one of the low-hanging stage lights got knocked over by the kids in the front who were moshing. I don’t know how the National Underground ownership feels about this. But it was an incredibly rad show.
