Brendan Young Blag

One of my Flickr photos I took at Video Games Live last year was recently used in an article. The article talks about how video games have music scores, and how surprising that fact is to people that don’t play video games. Check it out: http://www.nhpr.org/node/29252. I’m even in the credits at the bottom.

WOO!

About a year ago before I started using Twitter, I used a pretty neat service called Plurk. It’s similar to Twitter in that you send out a small update about yourself and people who are following you can see it, but Plurk does it with a clever charming horizontal scrolling layout. Eventually everyone in my “internet crowd” made the move to Twitter, so I followed suite.

Jump to today, or yesterday rather. I stumbled upon this article from Plurk’s blog: http://blog.plurk.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-rips-plurk/. Basically, Microsoft China made their own version of Plurk, going as far as to copy Plurk’s layout and change some colors, steal Plurk’s code, change some function names and add some soft returns.

That’s pretty low, Microsoft China.

I’m posting this to help get the word out. If you use Plurk or just want to spread the word, I suggest sending the above article to people you know who would be interested.

A while back a heard of a pretty cool “music adventure” site called thesixtyone.com. You get quests and complete them by listening to music in different ways and you gain exp and level up. It’s a pretty cool idea. The music available is uploaded by the bands so you won’t find anything mainstream, which is nice when my iTunes library gets a little dull.

I eventually came across this “NES-Rock” band from Chicago called I Fight Dragons. I pretty much instantly became a fan because they sing about stuff like Zelda and robots, and they covered Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ but with some Mario tunes thrown in. On stage they perform all their NES synth stuff by playing actual Nintendo controllers and peripherals that they’ve programmed to play music.

I somehow managed to get some free stickers from them by replying to one of their twitter posts. Here they are, sent all the way from the US in a hand addressed envelope:

I think that was pretty AWESOME of them.

Coincidentally one of my favorite songs of theirs, ‘The Future Soon’, is a cover of a Jonathan Coulton song of the same name. Jonathan Coulton is the guy who wrote the ‘Still Alive’ song from Portal. I started listening to him a lot as well. While playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo I noticed his song ‘Re: Your Brains’ playing from one of the in-game jukeboxes. My head pretty much exploded.

I highly reccomend listening to I Fight Dragons and Jonathan Coulton if you think you’d enjoy either NES-Rock or happy/funny songs about random stuff like what it would be like to live with a T1000.

Way back when Facebook Pages came out, I created one for Link. I watched as it gained a few members here and there but to be honest I pretty much forgot about it. Until about a week ago when Facebook messaged me asking me to prove I had the legal rights to post updates from Link within 3 weeks or they would take away my updating privileges, as if I was fooling everyone into believing I was Link and the REAL Link was getting angry. I also noticed that the page had gotten over 20,000 fans which I thought was pretty cool. I replied and said I wasn’t Link from the Zelda games nor did I work for Nintendo but that I would gladly give the rights to Nintendo if they wanted them. A few days later they replied saying they were taking away my ability to post updates:(. I can still edit the page however.

Here is the page if you want to take a look or become a fan.

This whole thing is pretty silly. Miyamoto probably isn’t on Facebook anyway.

I heard about Tumblr a long time ago, but for some reason it didn’t seem as appealing as it does now.

If you haven’t heard of it, its basically a blog site like Wordpress or Blogger but instead of just making posts, you choose from six different kind of posts: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, and Audio. I think it’s a pretty neat idea, but I’m not sure if I should use it since I have a blag already. I might use it if I think of an idea for a second blog.

I’m trying it out here.

Also: There’s a really cool Tumblr iPhone app that can use the camera and microphone to make Photo and Audio posts, so that’s pretty neat.

Participated in the Aion open beta last week. Despite some major lag issues early on, I was able to enjoy the improvements the Aion team has been making leading up to the game’s NA release on the 22nd (20th for us pre-orderers ).

Here’s some pictures.

I get a lot of junk mail. Like at least 3 or 4 pieces a day. I really hate it and I wish it would go away. After grabbing the mail today and grumbling about it to myself, I got an idea.

I live in an apartment building so I get my mail via one of those boxes where you can see into the mail room if you look through it. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to push ALL unwanted junk mail back through my mailbox onto the floor of the mail room, hopefully causing chaos and mayhem for whoever works or resides there. It’s a perfectly untraceable crime, and no one can stop me.

No one.

So this weekend I got to participate in the fifth closed beta for the upcoming MMO Aion: Tower of Eternity. It was really awesome. There’s nothing quite like flying over the landscape looking for prey, swooping down and taking them by surprise.

Death From Above

During the beta weekend I leveled a Elyos Gladiator to lvl 19, and an Asmodian Sorcerer to lvl 10. I modeled and named them after characters from Zelda:

Linkros

Ganondorph

The character customization is the best I’ve seen in an MMO. In fact, it’s as good as or better than Mass Effect’s.

I didn’t get high enough to enter the big PvPvE zone (The Abyss), but the PvE quests I did were well written and seemed to have flow. The “campaign” quests you do sometimes show a small cut scene as your character’s story progresses.

I had a lot of fun with Aion this weekend and I can’t wait for it to be released. September can’t come soon enough.

EDIT:

For those of you unfamiliar with the Zelda characters I based these guys off of:

Link

Ganondorf

That’s a lot of emoticons.

I don’t know the specifics, but a little bird told me that the iPhone has always had these emoticons and that Apple had to lock them away for some reason. Same bird also showed me a way to unlock them, and any iPhone you send these to will be able to render them.

Here’s how:

Download this free app onto your iPhone: Spell Number

Open Spell Number and type in this number: 91929394.59

Click return, and close the app (press the Home button)

Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese

Turn “Emoji” ON.

There you have it. Now whenever you want to type an emote just click the little globe in your keyboard and type away. Again, anyone who has an iPhone will be able to see these in an SMS (and I’ve seen it work on twitter).

EDIT:
Here’s an article about “Emoji”

Try it out.