blueZhift Blog

Much has been made of how video games may be recession proof, enjoying strong sales during the 2008 holiday season. Much of that, perhaps 99% of it was due to Nintendo’s Wii continuing to rack up big sales and in the process pull millions of so called casual gamers into the market.

Nintendo’s strong sales are great for Nintendo and the industry in general. But the Wii has also been accused of being the home of a lot of low quality games made to piggy back on the console’s success but sans any innovative gameplay to take true advantage of the motion sensitive controller. This should alarm anyone who remembers the last time a wildly popular games console became home to lots of crapware. That console was the Atari 2600 and the over abundance of bad games lead to the video games crash of the 1980s.

Atari never fully recovered from the disaster, and it is a bit ironic that Nintendo, the company that would replace Atari and essentially recreate the video games industry is in danger replaying that history. A lot of new gamers have come into the market thanks to Nintendo. Now Nintendo should do everyone a favor and stop approving every 3rd party game under the sun. Nintendo 1st party titles have been nothing but stellar, but a flood of crappy 3rd party games will kill them just as surely as they killed Atari.

Last week I finished editing my first live action music video!

Song: Mother
Composer: Tetsuya Takahashi (高橋哲也)
Video: Irradiate, a film by Jasna Palada
Music Video Editor: Shonen Jidai

Mother is one of my favorite songs from the Appleseed soundtrack and I’d been wanting to make a video with it for a long time. But I didn’t have anything that went with it. Then over the holidays, we got a copy of footage from Irradiate from the film’s creator, Jasna Palada. The violinist in the film is my daughter Jessica, and besides being very proud of her, Jasna’s camera work is beautiful! She said it was okay to use the footage for Jessica’s portfolio, and it fit the song perfectly, so here it is! Thanks Jasna!^_^

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled today that Jesse White, the Illinois Secretary of State does not have to sign off on the appointment of Roland Burris to the vacant Senate seat. So Jesse White has thusfar refused to certify the appointment which has led the U.S. Senate to thusfar refuse to seat Burris. What’s the point of this bullsh*t Jesse?

When terrorist use the innocent as human shields, you are not justified in mowing down the shields to get to the terrorists because they are such bad people. By refusing to sign, Jesse benefits no one and falls right into the trap the governor laid for them. The evil love pulling down as many of the innocent as they can before their own inevitable demise.

I guess Jesse White didn’t get the memo that at this part of the game having made his point, he’s supposed to say how terrible Governor Blagoyevich is for putting us in this position. But in the interest of the people of the State of Illinois, he will certify the appointment so that the people would have full representation in the Senate. Oh well, some people just don’t know how to play the game I guess.

It has become clear that the removal of Governor Rod Blagoyevich is going to take a long time. Roland Burris has a long and honorable history of public service and is not involved in the scandal in any way. He just wants to serve the people of Illinois in what will probably be his final role before retirement. There’s nothing wrong with Roland, so let’s seat him and move on!

Whether they like it or not, if the Democratic Senate leaders turn Burris away with the use of police and security personnel, it’s going to look very very bad. And in the light of the possible appointment of Caroline Kennedy, holding up Burris’ seating to check his qualifications is laughable. Why can’t we just acknowledge that sometimes “bad” men make good choices. Roland Burris is a good choice, so seat him.

After forever, I’ve finally upgraded my WordPress installation. So things are probably going to be broken for a while at least. Hopefully, the upgrade will allow me to post from Google Chrome which has been sharing time with Firefox on my computer. I’m writing this in Chrome right now, so if it posts properly then it’s a go!