I have not updated this blog in a very long time

I've been pulled in a lot of directions over the past half-year. I've got a new job and I've been working on some new things on the side.

I started writing for NegativeGamer.com and am now one of the editors there. It's an interesting site for sure, whose priorities lie not in their popularity or income, but in the pursuit of making the video game industry better (through constructive criticism, of course).

On the photography front, I'm shooting with a 5D MkII now (the pic you see above is my old 50D), which is pretty much the most awesome thing I've ever owned. Follow me on Flickr to keep up with my most current shots, because that's where they usually end up first.

I'm also looking to register JumaPhoto as a straight-up legit business in the new year. By the way, I have a website! It's not much right now, but we're working on it. I kind of want to find one of those old "Under Construction" gifs for the site. You know, the one with the little guy digging?

I'll be covering CES for Negative Gamer in a couple weeks. It's likely that some of my photos will end up on the Playstation Blog, as well. If there's anything you guys would like me to check out and report on at the show, let me know via the comments here and I'll do my best to accommodate.

The Importance of Post-Production: Part One

This will be the first entry in a series I hope to keep up for a while, entitled "The Importance of Post-Production". My belief is that no matter how skilled a photographer you are, good post-production will always give you a better photo than you started with.

This is a picture of my friend Lexi's eyeball. I did some work on the photo in Lightroom and Photoshop. Increased contrast and played with the colors a bit, bumped up sharpness and cloned out a few specks of makeup under her eye. The difference is subtle, but definitely noticeable.

Roll over this image to see what it looked like before post-production. What isn't immediately apparent – due to the size of this pic – is the increased detail in the eye (due to the increase in sharpness via Photoshop). Click on the pic to see it on my Flickr page, where you can see it full-sized. It looks much more impressive that way.

This controls this

I knew for a long time that this is something I'd be able to do, to an extent. I just wasn't sure about being able to use the PS3 controller to do it.

What you see above is my setup for playing SNES emulators on my 42" TV from across the room with my PS3 controller. Here's how it works:

• My PS3 controller is connected to my MacBook Pro, using the driver I downloaded here.

• Since I use Macs, it's very easy for me to screen share from my MacBook Pro (sitting in bed across the room) to my iMac (which outputs video to my 42" LCD as a secondary display).

• I screen share to my iMac and run the emulator in full-screen mode on the secondary display (my TV).

• Since the PS3 controller driver won't work across screen sharing, I use Gamepad Companion to re-map the button presses on the controller to keyboard inputs, which I then map accordingly in the emulator's preferences on my iMac.

• So, when I press buttons on my PS3 controller, they get sent to my MacBook Pro and are recognized by the driver mentioned above. Gamepad Companion remaps those button presses into keyboard strokes which are sent to my iMac wirelessly via screen sharing, and the iMac feeds those keyboard strokes into the emulator, whose keyboard preferences are mapped to match the button presses the iMac is telling it (which are, in turn, coming from my PS3 controller on my MacBook Pro). The emulator runs on my TV (as a second display for the iMac) and the button presses on my PS3 controller control the game displayed on my TV.

• In short, I sit in bed with my PS3 controller, and play Super Nintendo games on my TV across the room.

I'm not sure I can explain it any more in-detail than that, but I hope I made it simple enough for everyone to understand. The only issues I ran into involved the PS3 controller driver and Gamepad Companion (I had to restart the computer and turn off / on Gamepad Companion).

I've been having a blast playing A Link to the Past on my big-ass TV, and using the PS3 controller is pretty close to a SNES controller. It's bringing back a lot of memories. Once I get through LttP, I'm going to tackle Earthbound, since I never did finish that game way back when.

If anyone has questions regarding my setup, or has suggestions for simplifying it, let me know!

Special Others

I've probably told some of you about Special Others. They're a Japanese band with a kind of jazzy, indy rock feel to them. I'm no music critic so I have a harder time than that describing their genre.

Either way, I listen to them a lot, and their music cheers me up when I'm in a bad mood. That's usually a sign of good music. Since telling you to check them out will likely result in you thinking about it for two seconds then deciding it's too much work to find their music (which is hard as balls to find anyway), I've uploaded one of the tracks from their "IDOL" album. The song is called Quinto, it's eight-and-a-half minutes long, and it makes for great driving / chilling out / working music. You can find it here. This link is only good for the duration of March.

If you like this song, you can get more of their music from the iTunes Store, where they have their album "Ben" for sale. It's one of their best CD's, if not the best, and I can't recommend it enough. If you want to check out more of their stuff, get in touch with me and I'll help you find it.

Enjoy.

Cannon spike!

Steve and I have been running Rock Band Nights at Red, a local hookah lounge, and it's been going increasingly well each week. If you live in Vegas, I urge you to come down and check it out. Every Thursday night, from 7pm until 2am. Except this Thursday.

This Thursday, we'll be in Los Angeles for the Street Fighter IV launch party. My good friend and colleague J-Rubes tells me we're "rolling VIP" once we get there. I'm not sure what that means, but the man has never led me astray.

The ever-awesome Alex Verrey from Mad Catz hooked it up with a SFIV FightPad (the cool six-button pad like the old Genesis controllers), but it seems that there was a mix-up in the shipping and I received the 360 version of the controller. I plan on picking up the PS3 version of the game. I haven't decided how to deal with that situation yet.

I'm very excited for the trip on Thursday. I haven't driven to LA since E3 2007 (sucked). I'll be there at least twice this year, though, and it's going to be great. I miss that city.

We'll be hitting up Arcade Infinity on Friday, and we intend to take video of one (or both) of us playing Pop N Music with our face(s). If it's not horrible, I'll upload it when I return.

If you're reading this (unlikely) and you're going to be in LA on Thursday or Friday, get in touch with me. You're welcome to join for some Bemani-related shenanigans.

Back into the groove of things

My Animal Crossing review was published in the most recent issue of The Rebel Yell. Here, have a link.

I also got some of my pictures published on the Playstation Blog. Here, have another link. You can see the rest of my pics from the tournament on the PS Blog's Flickr page.

I checked out CES (lame), hung out with Jeff R. (who I hadn't seen in forever), he got me into some parties at CES where I met Nick Chester, Dale North and Conrad Zimmerman from Destructoid, and I took a ton of pictures.

I'm back in school, which means I'm going to start getting paid by The Rebel Yell rather than just being a contributing writer, which means I'm going to start writing far more often for them. Links will be posted here when that happens, naturally.

I played through the entire drum career on Guitar Hero: World Tour in one sitting.

Schteve and I are going to host a Rock Band Night at Red Hookah Lounge, so if you're in Vegas be sure to stop by tonight (January 15th) and check it out.

I wrote this entire entry from the bathroom.

Welcome back

Anyway, about video games.

I just got a package in the mail today with (among other things) Animal Crossing: City Folk in it. I really want to play it, but the first question asked of me when I turned it on was "Do you want to start where you left off in Animal Crossing: Wild World?" to which I replied enthusiastically "HELL YES."

I immediately started looking for my copy of Wild World, and two hours later am still searching. I don't want to start a new game when I have the option of picking up what I already had in Wild World. What a great feature! It's like backward compatibility plus! When something awesome like this happens, it figures that I can't find my damn game to do it.

So I'm grappling with either continuing my search, or just starting fresh, but man I'd really like to keep my old game going. I had a lot of time put into it.

Moving on. Still playing Rock Band 2 more than anything. Gold-starred the entire No Doubt pack with Schteve, and I'm currently working on gold-starring The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails. So there's that.

Gears of War 2 was a great game, but that was to be expected. Horde mode is a blast, but I've already moved on from that game after finishing campaign. I'm working on Fable 2 in between Rock Band 2 sessions, and now I've got to try and fit Animal Crossing in there as well.

I'll be writing a review of Animal Crossing in about a month; I'll post a link to that here once it's published. Till then, back to the search...