{"id":9661,"date":"2016-09-06T08:30:32","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T15:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/?p=9661"},"modified":"2016-09-06T01:44:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T08:44:18","slug":"zillion-fan-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/06\/zillion-fan-events\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome back from one of about a zillion different events!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>PAX, DragonCon, Burning Man, Bumbershoot, Fan Expo, Faerieworlds, I don&#8217;t even know what else. And, of course, a bunch of people stayed home. Where were you?<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/solarbird.net\/Livejournal\/2016-09\/dragonrider.jpg\"><br \/><i>I, of course, was at PAX, riding a dragon.<\/i><\/center><\/p>\n<p>I also released a single. It&#8217;s one that&#8217;s super-personal for a lot of reasons, and <a href=\"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/01\/the-future-has-a-place\/\">I wrote a big post about it here<\/a> which you should read because I think it&#8217;s the kind of thing that will mean a lot to a bunch of other people as well.<\/p>\n<p>And, of course, you can go right on and play it right here, which you should do. It&#8217;s on Bandcamp and also on <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/solarbird\/the-future-has-a-place\">Soundcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 350px; height: 442px;\" src=\"http:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/track=1271290936\/size=large\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=e99708\/tracklist=false\/transparent=true\/\" seamless><a href=\"http:\/\/music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/track\/were-not-friends-the-future-has-a-place\">We&#39;re Not Friends (The Future Has a Place) by Crime and the Forces of Evil<\/a><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>But PAX &#8211; wow, yeah. I didn&#8217;t intend to do all four days, but I did, and I&#8217;m glad I didn&#8217;t sell the extra passes. Totally worth it.<\/p>\n<p>First, in a lot of ways, I figured out why it&#8217;s felt different the last few years, but still good. PAX got too big to be the &#8220;instantiate the internet&#8221; event it started out being years go, and, having now spread out over several blocks (all the way to the Westin!), it&#8217;s become a gaming-oriented theme park overlay for the city.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a very different experience. But the thing is? I <Em>like<\/eM> theme parks. I had a <em>great<\/em> time. For example &#8211; I don&#8217;t give two figs about Magic: The Gathering but I loved tooling around <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/49137279@N07\/29493513625\/in\/dateposted-public\/\">the insanely-decorated Paramount<\/a>. I liked that there was a VR-events <Em>hotel<\/eM>. I liked the teeming hoards of geeks up all night downtown, the sidewalks like party wing hotel corridors only not so cramped. I liked finding said afterparties, as well. It was <Em>epic<\/eM>.<\/p>\n<p>And, the old parts are still there. I spent a fair amount of time in the handheld lounge and having people want to know <a href=\"https:\/\/getchip.com\/pages\/pocketchip\">where the hell this weird-ass handheld I was playing came from<\/a> and how they could get one. POCKETCHIP YOU OWE ME. (I was mostly playing Celeste on it, which is <Em>kinda brutal<\/em>. I&#8217;m 1km in so far. Hard game is hard.)<\/p>\n<p>From a coming-games standpoint, VIVE did what Oculus Rift did not do, which is convince me that goggle VR has a place in computer gaming in the very near term. It&#8217;s kind of like &#8211; okay, things like the Virtual Boy and predecessors (which existed!) weren&#8217;t quite yet up to Pong. Kinect was maybe Advanced Pong. Oculus Rift made a big jump forward, and is kind of an, oh, maybe an Atari 2600 experience &#8211; fun to play with, but not fun to <em>play<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p>Vive, though &#8211; yeah. Vive reaches the level of being <eM>actual<\/em> fun. <a href=\"https:\/\/picpicsocial2.s3.amazonaws.com\/2016\/9\/183397579\/2016-09_pax2016_225_(output_1).mp4\">Look, here I am shootin&#8217; a bazooka and throwing grenades at Nazis<\/a>! Because <EM>fuck<\/em> Nazis. Really, I wish they&#8217;d been doing the greenscreen for another game called Raw Data, because that was the most fun, because it was 100% I AM TRACER ONLY FOR REAL WITHIN VR. That was <em>great<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And sure, it&#8217;s probably about the Commodore 64 \/ Atari 800 level of VR device, particularly since there are still controllers with buttons &#8211; even if they&#8217;re a lot less intrusive than, say a gamepad. But as we all know from history, Commodore 64 is Good Enough. Game ON.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, what else. The Overwatch cosplay was thick, I shot every Overwatch cosplayer I could grab (which was not all I saw) and put <A target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/49137279@N07\/29493514625\/in\/dateposted-public\/\">a bunch of photos on Flickr<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I entered a lot of hardware raffles (like usual) but did not win (like usual). I played a hilariously stupid game called <i>Gang Beasts<\/i> which is technically a fighting game, but all of the characters are floppy plushies. I won one round by deciding I&#8217;d just go jogging around the outskirts of the arena instead of fighting and the other players all accidentally threw themselves off the edge of the world. VICTORY THROUGH JOGGING! And I scouted out a lot of hardware, like y&#8217;do, for when there&#8217;s money again and I can think about building a VR gaming PC.<\/p>\n<p>Like y&#8217;want to, at least. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>Where were you, and was it fun? <a href=\"http:\/\/music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/track\/were-not-friends-the-future-has-a-place\">Play the new song while you&#8217;re telling me about it<\/a>. It&#8217;s the kind of thing I think a lot of us are going to need heading into the rest of this year, and for now, hopefully, we&#8217;re all coming off a good long weekend. Time to get back to work.<\/p>\n<p><small><i>we&#8217;re not friends, we&#8217;re not lovers, we&#8217;re not people you know<br \/>different clans, different colours, and a whole different flow<br \/>but i know that when i see you that it&#8217;s true even so<br \/>that the future has a place for me<br \/>and the future has a place for you<br \/>and the future has a place for both of us now<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PAX, DragonCon, Burning Man, Bumbershoot, Fan Expo, Faerieworlds, I don&#8217;t even know what else. And, of course, a bunch of people stayed home. Where were you? I, of course, was at PAX, riding a dragon. I also released a single. It&#8217;s one that&#8217;s super-personal for a lot of reasons, and I wrote a big post [&#038;hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shows","category-songs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9661"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9665,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9661\/revisions\/9665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crimeandtheforcesofevil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}