ydnar

Retirement?

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:00:33 -0800

Sometime before Flickr and Twitter scratched my lazy itch, I used to blog. Whole paragraphs! Structured sentences, posts with conclusions and enclosures! Double entendre! Exclamation points!

Retirement’s been mostly a drag, just kidding. Yesterday I woke up to the sounds of my parents’ neighbors dogs barking. Apparently they’re redoing the kitchen and they’d given the kids a Wii for Christmas. All Wii and no wee, ah nevermind. Poor pups. My newly slashed thumb was stitched up, and I managed to gimp along with just one opposable digit.

crowd

Parents had an epic holiday party, with the whole congregation and a large part of the caucasian, largely older, largely richer than you crowd came by for a drink of pinot gris (and not chardonnay, as my unscientific testing proved). I took photos, poured wine & Diet Coke and generally played the good PK (that’s Preachers Kid). Dad was a good host, and Mom made sure stuff happened. I’ve never seen them cook more food consumed so quickly. Where lesser mortals would have catered the whole sum bitch, they made. Everything. From. Scratch.

parents in the kitchen

Can I just say that phylo-wrapped white asparagus is basically crack?

liz

Met some interesting folk including a Baltimore inner-city school teacher and an elderly gent who’d lived the entirety of his life in Cambridge Maryland. He kept asking me if I was applying to move back. I wasn’t quite sure if he was fucking with me or not.

Apres party, Mom and I took off to head back to Alexandria, Virginia. She works 5 days out of every 2 weeks at the hospital in the ICU. It was good to kick it with the moms. We got stuck in traffic on the Chesapeake bay bridge, drove by Annapolis and circled half the beltway back to Old Town.

Met up with an old friend Dennis at his place of business, and he gave me a CD of his noise/ambient including a remix of a track I’d made a decade ago. It sounds like he just slowed it down 75% and added noise, but my now unsophisticated ears aren’t attenuated to the sounds of ambient like they used to be. Maybe if it was sped up and covered by a singer-songwriter.

Afterwards, I ran into the Korean crew, drinking & smoking in one of the Old Town locals, and my resident BFF Dabysan dropped in. We made to another bar, and watched (some of us Sang) karaoke amidst the Virginia-legal cloud of tobacco. Technically it was day six without a smoke, but it didn’t feel like it this morning.

dabysan

This morning I had a cup of my old favorite, Misha’s. Harrar Americano, short cup, less water pls thx. Ran into Misha, Andrea, Joel, Sang, Dabysan and a few other folk. The place hasn’t changed much in the 2.5 years I’ve been absent, except for a coat of paint and a new logo on the cups. And onesies for sale.

Today was an epic battle against the internet gnomes, rain, designing, photographing and drinking more coffee. It’s almost midnight here on the east coast, and the rain’s let up. Time for something new, like fomenting plans for flights across the globe. There are 5 tabs open to Expedia, one to Vox and one to Twitter. This place is closing in 6 minutes, and I’ve got an itch to scratch.

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QotD: Best Gift of ‘07

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:47:32 -0800

What's the best gift you received this year?

Best tangible gift, anyway.

Dad gave me his vintage Leica III rangefinder. It weighs more than my first car. I hope to shoot lots of black & white in the next few weeks.

Also, FTW! <3

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First Person Shooter

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:53:28 -0800

Outbound on the 22 Fillmore

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I Can Has Festive Bagel

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:28:32 -0800

Nom Nom Nom

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I ♥ Skids

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:29:48 -0800

On Sunday Beau and I rode up the Marin headlands to film a long skid from the top. Since we’re good at math, our calculations for how long the tire would actually last were, in fact, wrong. Physics was working against us and the skid blew early. Fortunately, we had enough footage to fit the tune and this is what we ended up with:

I ♥ Skids

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Together Foreber

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:54:11 -0800

Toes and Pose

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Three Groomsmen

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:58:35 -0800

Three Groomsmen

David, the wedding photographer posted this triptych on his Flickr.

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The Beginning of the End of My Design Career

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:33:26 -0700

Poseidon

When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an architect or a filmmaker. I drew lots of pictures, mostly pen & ink of monsters and cathedrals. I built clocks and violins and artificial limbs with Legos. It was a typical (I suppose) childhood for a kid who liked to draw. I drew a few yearbook covers for school, and illustrations for other bits.

doubleaught.com

In 1992, I started playing around with Freehand and Photoshop. I later moved onto Illustrator, and very quickly my use of traditional media dwindled. I fell in love with Helvetica, post-modernism, Emigre and The Designers Republic. I tried and utterly failed to make it as a freelance designer in New York, and oscillated back to software engineering.

At a startup in Virginia in 1998, I was the closest thing they had to a designer, so design I did. The logo, the letterhead, marketing materials, even a trade show booth. It was a non-subtle nod to AIGA and Apple. Garamond Condensed, Bondi Blue and symbols evoking the original Interplay logo were the order of the day. We made tons of one-off products for various clients, skinning our site. Our business model revolved around integrating business data (sourced from InfoUSA) with WHOIS data (sourced from somewhere shady).

iChannel 6

We were acquired by AltaVista in 1999, and with that the need for a designer evaporated and I moved to doing coding & software architecture full time. Until I occillated back to game design, that is…

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Proto ydnar

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:07:22 -0700

Proto ydnar

http://roxyhart.vox.com/library/post/...

Hey, I was platinum once too!

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Aye Mak Sicur

nobody@vox.com(ydnar) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:34:32 -0700

Aye Mak Sicur

Found this on YouTube—a video of someone (badly) playing through the opening level in Marathon Infinity. I made this level and the accompanying textures in 1996 while drinking way too much Coke and listening to Portishead. The music definitely influenced the textures.

Update: Yes! Portishead’s new album!

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