(may we meet again)

So I was thinking of finally trimming up my attrocious beard for my company’s Holiday party so I could look respectable. However, the Thursday before that I went out drinking with a few guys to send off a co-worker who is retreating to academia. I mentioned that I was thinking of trimming my beard. One of my (drunk) co-workers declared that I wouldn’t do it. He bet me I wouldn’t do it. After I just said I was going to do it.

I took him up on that bet. What did we wager, you might ask? Not money – more than money. Credibility. As an organization of dorks at my job, we have an engineered system of determining someone’s credibility. People’s credibility ratings are documented on an intranet page that also records the transactions(bets) that modify our credibility.

Credibility is the system we use to act smug and put less credible people’s ideas down. It is very important.

Anyway, now that you have a better understanding of what was on the line with this bet, you understand that I had to go all of the way. It was time for the beard to come off. For posterity, I documented the stages of this process.

In case you haven’t seen me in a while, this is what I used to look like

nobody will ever see me looking like this in person again

Actually, I really liked this stage. BUT I HAD A FREAKIN BET GOING ON

This is me now. Terrible, I know

But wait, THAT’S NOT ALL! I actually had Tim help me take lots of pictures and I strung them together into an irritating animated gif of spinning objects (an internet no-no):

Oh yeah, I also got a haircut in case you didn’t notice.

ANYWAY

So other than that, I’ve been getting quite busy at work recently. Last night I was at work until almost midnight, although that is definately an exceptional case. I haven’t added my hours up for this week yet, but I estimate it coming in around 60.

This unfortunately has left Orbital development kind of dead in the water, which is a little bit of a bummer. We’ll see what happens. Hopefully I won’t be this busy all the way until GDC.

Opus 15

I might have mentioned Musagi a few times already. I just recently started playing around with VSTi plug-ins. This is a great way of getting quality sounding instruments for free. I made a new song recently while playing with the instruments. Sadly, Musagi doesn’t actually handle VSTi instruments that well. It goes really slow, takes up a ton of Ram, crashes frequently, and in one case currupted my file. To make this song, I had to write one track at a time out to wav then composite them in a seperate program. That was a huge pain and i’d like to avoid doing it again. I also realized that the instruments I used didn’t have sounds for some of the notes I wrote so part of the song doesn’t even play.

In any case, it was a fun experiment. You can listen to it here: Opus 15

Happy Holidays people. (damn, that reminded me I have to do holiday gift shopping, now I’m depressed)