Falling from Skateboards

Posted on 16th December 2010 in Something Daily

The last two days have gone pretty much as I expected: full of nothing. Yesterday morning I had an 8 am final and nothing else for the rest of the day. Having to get up at 7 wasn’t so awesome, as I’d been up very late the night before cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom – I also went through all of the old food that had been accumulating in our fridge…that was bad. But yesterday after my final, nothing really happened other than a lot of Arrested Development and some video gaming. I did skate a little bit, going to the park near my apartment and working on my ollie time after time after time. Actually, immediately upon arriving at the park, I hit a bump in the stones (with my hands in my hoodie pocket) and hit the ground hard, so I ended up practicing for an hour with a bruised knee. But I do notice myself improving slowly. Emphasis on slowly. I stayed in one area the whole time, just riding up and down the street, jumping over potholes, paint, and curbs. I managed not to hurt myself (too badly), which is a bit embarrassing to admit. In a sense, I’m not really too embarrassed by it, though, because it means that I’m willing to practice. I’ve actually noticed the more I hurt myself, the less apprehensive I am about trying again the next time.

I feel more outgoing recently, which is new. I recently had an experience in which I was put into a position of having to start a conversation with a stranger, and for whatever reason, I did something very much unlike myself and rose to the occasion. I’ve been on the road toward the realization that I have a right to be confident for a while now, and that instance and the subsequent events were a big, big help (sorry for being so cryptic, but I feel like I still want to say this). Essentially, I’ve been doing much better on that front recently.

Let it be known that this blog exists for the purpose of me saying whatever it is I want to. It doesn’t really ever have to pertain to anything in particular, as far as I’m concerned. Just wanted to throw that out there.

I found an awesome blog today, by a guy who’s meeting a new woman every day for a year (and through whom I’m living vicariously). It’s called You Can’t Love ‘em All.

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Turns out Steam games come with a bunch of raw content

Posted on 20th November 2010 in Something Daily

Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of Three Stegosaurus Moon. We’ve got a great post planned for you today. It has it all. Even dinosaurs.

After a few days of me being mentally elsewhere due to this project that I won’t shut up about, I have returned. I woke up this morning without feeling the uncontrollable urge to start coding and solving problems. I slept in (until 8:45…late, huh?), had a nice long stretch, made myself some breakfast, and have so far had a very relaxing morning. I think I’m going to avoid skating today, in light of what happened last time I did. The scratch on my arm is healing, but it still looks pretty gross. I catch people staring at it sometimes…my eyes are up here, okay?. I believe I’m going to do almost nothing today, as I feel like I deserve it due to the big amount of concentrated effort over the last few days.

Let me just say one last thing about my esync/backup project. Writing a Perl script that recursively traverses directories and copies their contents is something that I didn’t think I could do four days ago. In a way, I still don’t believe that I can. Yet somehow I managed to do it – within the space of three days – and it works exactly the way I intended it to. I must be getting better at programming, or something. I just wanted to make it known that I, Emmett J. Butler, am proud of myself. For once.

As you may know, my roommate London had a recording session for his class last night on which he asked me to assist. The first thing I found out was that the Clive Davis studios are way nicer than the average Music Tech studio. Everything is just cleaner and bigger, and in better condition. But not to compare the two programs or anything. They’re completely different.

The session was to track a woodwind/brass section for London’s hip hop track, which involved seven musicians playing live. So we had lots of mics, gobos, and headphones for everybody. I’ve never engineered a session with that many people on it before, and it really drove home the point that to make one of them work, you have to know exactly what to say to the musicians to get the best performance. It’s like you’re putting on a disguise every time you hit the talkback button. The session was great, and I ended up assisting in a pretty big capacity.

I made the discovery last night that every game you download on Steam uses an unencrypted directory full of the media such as videos, audio and textures that it needs to function. I stumbled on this folder last night during a backup, and literally everything from the games is there in raw form. Every Team Fortress 2 map video, every zombie scream and gun sound effect from Left 4 Dead, the Portal song, everything. It’s just there, in .wav or .mp4, for the taking. I don’t know what I’ll do with this knowledge, if anything, but it’s crazy to see. You definitely don’t get that with a console game.

Check out what I found. I know somebody who’d eat The World’s Largest Gummi Worm (hint: it’s Andrew)

Dinosaurs.

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