Back in 6th grade my life was all about playing Nintendo. I wasnt just a fan, it wasnt a hobby, my life absolutely revolved around it. You see, near the end of my 5th grade school year my dad died, and my mom decided to move us to the middle of nowhere. We moved to a little town called Pickwick Tennessee. We didnt move to the part where people actually lived, we moved to where all of the vacation homes were. So, for most of the year we were surrounded by empty houses, and for a couple months a year we were surrounded by spoiled rich assholes. Me and Daren didnt want to move there. We really didnt want to. So, for the first time in what later became a trend in our family, our mom bribed us. Daren got a guitar amp. A nice peavey half stack. Now that I think about it, hey Daren, whatever happened to that thing? Anyway, I got a Nintendo Entertainment System, a NES Advantage controller, and a handful of games. So, I started my 6th grade year at Pickwick Southside Elementary School. A school where the students have known each other since birth and dont go running to the new kids. A school where the teachers all must have had lives so pathetic that they had to take out their frustrations by constantly showing the kids how much more important they were than them. (I actually heard a teacher tell her student go ahead, make my day all Clint Eastwood style, not even jokingly, she was actually taking the shit seriously!) Anyway, being the new kid I wasnt exactly mister popular so I spent almost all of my free time playing Nintendo. One of the games that I spent a lot of time on back then was called Blaster Master. It was about some guy with a jumping tank trying to rescue his pet frog who accidentally mutated after jumping onto a vat of radioactive toxic waste that the guy kept in his yard. I know, its a stupid story, but a really cool game. Its one of those games that me and Tim Stevens would stay up all weekend playing. One of us would play while the other navigated with the appropriate issue of Nintendo Power magazine. (Hey Tim, if you read this email me!) Now this was a pretty in depth game where you had to find your way through different levels and get power ups and backtrack to figure out where to go next. Not just your typical run from left to right and kill stuff game. But what made it different from similar games like Metroid or Zelda is that it didnt have any type of password or save feature. You had 3 lives and 5 continues and then you just had to start over from the beginning. So, I never made it all the way through. Earlier this year I got a new phone that runs all sorts of cool software. One cool program that I got is a NES emulator. So, for the past couple weeks in my spare time Ive been playing Blaster Master. The emulator not only lets me save the game to work on it later, it lets me save at any point so I can make sure I go through each area as carefully as possible so I never really have to die in the game. I know its cheating, but since when is it wrong to cheat in Nintendo games? (up up down down left right b a start anyone?) So, yesterday I finally beat the game and saw the cheesy ending where it says very thanks for the first time. (you have to love the half assed translation efforts they made back then) I feel like I accomplished something that has been missing, and somehow brought closure to something that has been open for a long time. I know its a simple thing, but hey, Im just weird like that I guess.

Last saturday I went to see Cinderella and Poison. It was a really fun show! Both groups were on their 20th aniversary tour but they still sounded pretty much as they did 2 decades ago. I cought the last 3 songs by the opening band too. They were pretty good, but I never caught their name. If anybody knows who the opener was, let me know!

Most of you know that I've never really considered myself much of a singer. I usually prefer doing the occasional backing vocals or when creating my own stuff sticking to instrumentals. But, I made a special exception and decided to try my hand at singing. Last friday was the two year anniversary of my first date with Kathy. So to mark the occasion, I decided to surprise her by writing and recording a song for her. Both of us are big fans of 80's rock and metal, so I figured instead of doing the normal acoustic guitar or piano thing, I'd go all out and do a full fledged powerballad! I didn't have much time to put it together, but I think it turned out ok, and luckily Kathy liked it :) So anyway, if you'd like to check it out, here it is....

I want to wish a happy 6-6-06 day to everybody! Now go out and do something evil to celebrate!

Ok, I know what you're thinking, but no this post isn't about drugs, it's about music. A friend of mine has a political blog called Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. From time to time he likes to do parody songs about different subjects. This time he chose the Eric Clapton song Cocain and wrote parody lyrics about comedian Stephen Colbert's performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. I provided all of the music for him this time around. The drums and bass were sequenced and the guitars were my first recorded guitar performance in over 2 years. It's funny, I used to record something new on guitar at least once a week, but I suppose I've been busy lately. Anyway, check out the song and then let me know what you think!

Wednesday night for the first time I got to see something that I created shown on the big screen. I've been doing animation and music for some local indy film groups for a while now, but I've never been able to make it to any screenings because I always had to work or had something else going on. It was pretty crazy. You create in this tiny little window on this tiny little screen and then you see the finished product projected so huge! It was a lot different than I expected.

In other news, we added a 2nd rough mix to the Infinity Minus One page. If you haven't already, go check it out!

Last weekend I took part in the 48 Hour Film competition. It's a thing where groups of film makers compete against eachother to make a short movie in 48 hours. We did it last year too, but this year we knew what we were in for and I think we did a much better job. We did a horror movie this time. It has a sort of Twin Peaks meets The Shining type feel to it. I did the music and titles and a little sound design. I'll have some clips from it up on my page soon, and hopefully the entire movie will be up in the near future.

Infinity Minus One finaly has a band page on myspace. So if you haven't already, go and add it to your friends list!

I saw something disturbing on the news last night. There's this crappy little hole in the wall speed trap town that I have to drive through twice a day. There's no industry, no tourism, and no noteworthy shopping locations. This is the type of useless town I thought I'd left behind, a town who's primary source of income is traffic tickets and who's chief export is more than likely guests on Springer. Anyway, I was watching the news last night and I heard about a 5 year old girl who was suspended because she hugged a classmate while at recess. Apparently at this school it is against the rules for the kids to touch each other. That means they can't play tag, duck duck goose, red rover, they can't even shake hands! How emotionally messed up are these kids going to turn out growing up thinking it's a crime to touch anybody? They'll either turn into obsessive compulsives or serial killers by my guess. I think I'll generalize my opinion of the problem and say it comes down to baby boomers not being able to raise kids. They messed up for the most part with their own kids which explains why my generation is so screwed up. Now that they are the policy makers they're screwing up the next generation too. The parents don't want this. In fact, this child's mother is planning to move to another town to get away from this school system. I'm not saying that the whole generation is to blame, I'm just saying that a good amount of them don't have their stuff together. To quote William Shatner, maybe they "did too much LDS in the 60's"?

Anyway, on to happier news. I was listening to knac again this morning on the way in to work and they played Love/Hate's Black Out in the Red Room. That made me smile. You don't hear those guys on the radio enough.

It's April 5th. It's not supposed to be snowing on April 5th, but this morning it was anyway. Definitely not a heavy snow by Massachusetts standards, but enough that it would have probably closed school back in good ol' Savannah. Hopefully this will be the end of the cold and summer will start soon. Massachusetts doesn't have a spring. We've got summer, fall, winter, and more winter. This is obviously still the more winter part. Where's global warming when you need it?

On an unrelated note...
Rock radio in this state sucks. For some reason this state never has gotten over the fact that the grunge revolution ended a decade ago. I usually listen to the classic rock station in the car, but like most classic rock stations they just keep playing the same songs over and over again.
When I'm at my computer, I like to listen to knac.com online. It's a pretty cool metal station. No commercials, not much talking, and a good variety of different types of metal music from glam to death. The problem with it is that after listening to it for a while and then getting into my car, it just emphasizes that much more how bad the radio around here sucks. So this morning I decided to try listening to it in the car over the MDA. (yes, I'm still obsessed with my new cell phone) it came in pretty good for the most part when I was on the major highways and interstates. It dropped out for a few minutes when I was driving through some of the smaller towns west of 128. Overall, I'm impressed by it. Being able to listen to internet radio on a portable device is just fun. Can't do that on an ipod ;) Anyway, it made the drive through the snow a bit more tolerable.