iam(still)kevin.

according to this long and verbose post by gabe newell, the RC for half life 2 has apparently gone to vivendi for testing.

i’m sorry i took advantage of you to get a free zippo lighter. i don’t actually smoke, even though i told you i did. you can stop sending me smoking paraphanelia in the mail, it’s really just going to waste. i mean, i like the playing cards you sent me, i guess you can’t ever have enough of those, but i don’t need your coupons, or your “Unlimited” magazine, even if it does feature shannon elizabeth. i don’t even think i want to be friends, i mean, you don’t smoke, but everyone you know does, and that’s not cool. who knows, maybe i’ll lie to you again later to get another lighter (you can never have enough zippo’s either), but for now it’d be best if you just left me alone.

sorry again,
kevin.

but so are you.

I had my party last night, it was pretty fun. about 30 people showed up, and there was much drinking and good times.
my good friends rob, kathy, tyler and mike, knowing that I’m half-mexican, thoughfully got me a traditional piñata to break; a traditional care bear piñata. strung up, as tradition says, with belts looped together, and of course broken with the traditional french bread baguette. did i mention my friends are retarded?

For some reason, someone complained at around 12:30 that we were being too loud on the patio, despite the fact that there were maybe 3 people out there, having a conversation. but by that point there were under a dozen of us left, so we managed to squeeze into jeff’s place and hung out there for a while after cleaning up a bit downstairs.
oh yeah, drunk rob is rather amusing.
i had fun, hopefully everyone else did too.

other things…
i watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse on Friday night with Jon and Tom. I liked it, i thought it was pretty good actually. I wasn’t expecting too much other than zombie-ass kicking with Milla jovovich, but they actually had characters that you cared about and some good action scenes. and they didn’t rely too much on Doom 3 style scares, i.e. something jumping out at you. It was more like the way Aliens operated, with a few startling moments, but mostly action/sci-fi/horror. And they pretty blatantly hinted at a third chapter, i’m hoping they do make it, but i haven’t heard any news about it.
There was a trailer for Blade: Trinity, which looks like it’ll be entertaining, hopefully a little better than Blade 2 was anyway.

Next week, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow!

my damn throat better not be hurting tonight. went to the doctor took some tests, got some antibiotics, maybe that’ll help.

michigan football at noon, yay afternoon games, i can sleep later.

I watched House of the Dead saturday night. It is an awesome terrible horrible movie. really bad acting, bad dialog, bad directing, bad editing, bad music, bad scene transitions… pretty much bad everything. It’s supposedly based on the arcade game House of the Dead, even though it has really nothign at all to do with it. It takes place on the San Juan islands (so they say), with a bunch of kids going to a rave, leaving from Seattle.
Many scenes have shots from the arcade game as the transition, a lot of times in places that don’t make sense, they re-use scenes 3 or 4 times, the zombies just look like people in zombie outfits, random things that don’t make sense happen. it’s just quality.

Went to the last day of bumbershoot today.
I was planning on going, getting a wristband to get into the Pixies show, and seeing some bands. But Jeff called me and said they ran out of wristbands. So, we headed to his place, and using the wonderful Photoshop, Jeff made some very convincing wristband replicas which we printed up and took with us. So, i ended up getting there a little later than I had planned and missed the very beginning of Control Machete, another band from mexico that I wanted to see. I didn’t know anything about them, but if you’ve seen that Levi’s commercial with the guy walking down the street while his legs do some crazy dance, the song played in the background is “Si Señor” by control machete. They were cool, though i couldn’t understand the lead singer hardly at all. I think i liked Plastilina Mosh more than these guys, but they were pretty cool. Afterwards we headed to a bar to give some wristbands to some people, then went back and stood forever in the main stage stadium to get a good spot for the pixies. (Jeff really likes the pixies. I’m familiar with a few of their songs, but i had nothing else to do. Plus they broke up 14 years ago, so it’s somewhat historic that they’re together again). We got a pretty good spot, about 40 feet back from center stage. The only problme was that it was 6:30 and we had to wait until 8:00 for Built to Spill to go on, and the Pixies were on at 9:30. So, we stood for a long long time. My legs were unhappy.
Built to Spill wasn’t bad, but none of them showed any emotion during the whole set, which apparently was part of their thing. I think it’s pretty stupid, it makes it look like they don’t care about their music. I’d rather see a band happy and excited to be playing than resenting every minute they’re there or seemingly falling asleep.
Finally at 9:30 the Pixies came on. Let me tell you, it’s rather amusing seeing a big 250 pound fat bald guy singing in a really high pitched voice. They were pretty cool, I knew a few of their songs (this monkey’s gone to heaven, where is my mind, debaser… a bunch of others) so that was kinda neat. THe place was absolutely packed, and I only got kicked in the head by a crowd surfer once. It was kinda weird though, most of the audience, at least near the stage, were a bunch of young kids, like 18 and under. Not sure why they were there, since they were 4 years old when the pixies broke up, but the good thing was they were all largely under 5′6″, so we had a clear view of the stage, minus a few exceptions.

All in all it was a pretty good weekend. Hopefully next year will be just as fun.

new pictures, of course.

damn it, i need to work tomorrow.

I hit bumbershoot again to see Plastilina Mosh. They were really cool, kind of a mix of Beastie Boys in spanish with some Daft Punk-ish dance music and some other random styles. actually, they reminded me in some ways of how random Moby is with his music. I think i might go pick up their CD at some point, they were good. And they keyboard guy reminded me a lot of Vince Vaughan, especially his character in Starsky & Hutch.
The guitarist was cool too, he was really funny and goofy. and that’s basically the whole band. Sometimes they’d have a drummer, sometimes a guy playing bass. And they had one of the guys from Control Machete (who i’m going to see today) join them for a song. But mostly I think it’s just those two guys with a lot of recorded stuff, drum beats, bass lines, random things.
Then i saw MASS again, they were cool again. And the girl playing the 20 foot tall Wing Harp is very good looking. So i took lots of pictures of her.
After MASS, I gave Jeff a call and then miraculously managed to actually find him at the Public Enemy show. It must have been thanks to his precise GPS-like location instructions: “There’s that sound stage thing in the middle. I’m about 40 feet left of that.” So.. I waded through the crowd until I was to the left of the sound booth thing and just started walking forward, looking around as best I could. And somehow found him.
Public Enemy was pretty cool, not that I’m especially a fan. But they had some songs I recognized, and they put on a good show. hip hop and rap artists seem like they like to talk to the audience a lot more than rock bands. Nickelback did a little bit, but only in between songs, and they didn’t really say much. It’s probably due to the nature of how hip hop songs work, but Chuck D and Flava Flav talked a lot more throughout the show, which was cool.

Well, i was finally able to get a nice 9 hours of sleep last night, which I had been needing for a while. Maybe i’ll even be able to get over this neverending sore throat/congestion soon. probably not though. Maybe it’s sticking around until it gets colder, since it came to early, and it doesn’t want to disappoint. I’m feeling mostly fine, but i’d say i’m at 80%, and have been for a while.

Oh yeah, i also saw a Jeff’s long-haired gay-looking doppelganger, and a ted nugent look-alike. check the pictures.

i guess uploading a hundred 2 megabyte pictures takes up a lot of space. i kinda ran out of room on my server.
resizing the pictures down to 1024×768 really cuts down on room a lot. now instead of 100 MB for 50 pictures, it’s 5 MB.
that ought to work better.
also rearranged the gallery a bit, and the sideways pictures are now right side up, and it’s all better now. I think the slow upload speed coupled with gigantic pictures screwed up the automatic upload and resize thing it’s supposed to do when you upload them.

Bumbershoot today was pretty neat, I didn’t see too much though. There was one band/group called Mass Ensemble. They played sorta tribal beats with guitar and some crazy instruments - 20 foot harps and this enormous string/cable instrument thing. they were kinda cool, reminding me in a few ways of some of tool’s non-vocal music.
Then i went and helped Ivy move. that wasn’t as fun, but didn’t take too long.
After that, I returned to see Nickelback. I happened to run into a friend in the parking lot so we headed over together, after she called another friend she knew there. Nickelback was good but also not so good. The problem is, the more albums they release the more radio friendly music they have, and so they play that at their shows. But the nickelback music i like is the stuff they don’t play on the radio, so i think no more nickelback cocnerts for me.
We headed to the sky church to check out the electronic music there. It was alright, but i love the sky church cause it basically has a huge wall-sized music visualization. I could stare at that thing for hours. Next we chilled out by the big fountain and listened to drum circles which was interesting, then I was hungry since i didn’t get to eat dinner between moving and heading back for nickelback, so we hit the Hurricane for a tasty burger and a great milkshake. and now i’m uploading pictures and getting a couple hundred megs of crap off my server space.

and now I think I’ll go to sleep, got a big day of bbq and more bumbershoot tomorrow.

you can check out revamped and new pictures at iampictures

so, not sure why, but i’m feeling pretty happy at the moment for no particular reason. not that i’m usually depressed or anything, but i’m just feeling good in general.
Lets see, i’ll be 25 in a week and i’m having a party with most everyone i know, i like my job and work is good, got a 3 day weekend starting tomorrow, i’m gonna watch michigan kick some ass tomorrow morning (and probably fall asleep in the middle of the game), bumbershoot is this weekend, the power went out in my building this afternoon so i got to go home a little early. i’ve got good friends and i’m meeting new ones too which is cool, and really i’ve got nothing to complain about. there are some things i’m sad about, but not in a mopey depressed i’m going to listen to the cure kind of way. things happen and you gotta roll with the punches and keep on going, cause usually it’s not the end of the world. and if it is, well, you’re fucked anyway, so try to do something good before it’s over.

you know, i wonder if i should take some kind of writing class. i tend to ramble on (now the time, the time is now / sing that song / i’m goin round the world. i gotta find my girl) when i write. that probably makes whatver I write hard to read; good thing I never have to. like this paragraph right here. i just threw a random thought i had in the middle of a post. sorry.

I picked up Los Lonely Boys’ debut album a couple days ago, and I’m liking it. They are three mexican-american brothers who play latin-tinged blues rock, and they are pretty good. I happened to watch a little of the Latin Grammy’s last night and they played a sweet version of La Bamba with Santana in tribute to Richie Valens, the first famous latino rock star. Santana proclaimed Los Lonely Boys the next American Mexican Latino rock legends.. or something like that. Anyway, they’re good.

And speaking of the Latin Grammy’s, George Lopez hosted them, and he is kind of annoying. I mean, I’d rather watch him host an awards show than Billy Crystal, but that’s like asking if you’d rather get punched in the arm or have your hand cut off.
On the other hand, Roselyn Sanchez is quite a good looking girl.
And if someone would just slap Jessica Simpson, that would be great. I’m not sure why, but she did a song with some silly looking latin music guy, David Bisbál. Check him out, he’s (sarcastic) great: “loook at my esexy eyebrowss”. the whole song, he just had this one pose he would do. he’d sing in the pose, run like 5 feet forwards, and get back into his pose.

Also, Portuguese is one crazy language. I couldn’t understand a word of it that was said when presenting the Brazileireo (that is spelled so wrong) music award.
It was amusing seeing the commercials in spanish that are usually shown on Telemundo and Univision. I love how the whole thing is in spanish except for the product they’re selling: yo tengo dientes limpios y blancos porque yo siempre uso Colgate Whitening Toothpaste cuando me lavo los dientes.

alright, i’m out.

i’m having a party next saturday. if you can come, and you’re reading this, (and you know me, even remotely) you’re welcome to come. let me know and i’ll send you the invite.