Raw Consciousness

My life - yup, I am still here.

In the interim, I worked shipping a game in two platforms, three territories, went through 3 more cameras (Olympus Pen E_P1 and Sigma DP2, gave away the Pen as a gift, kept the Sigma, bought the e-620 before all that.. arg).

But before I elaborate with more stuff, here's a game you have to play on PS3 if you like a challenge, you love RPG's and you feel like this whole next gen of games so far has been too linear, too predictable, too much hand holding, too many party games...

  

Yes, the game is hard. But you get proficient and kick ass.  It's the first PS3 game I buy, and it may very well be the best I have played so far (and that includes over Uncharted 2 perhaps, but since I haven't finished Uncharted 2 I don't know yet).  It's hard to draw such comparison though, both games are very different genres.

MY LIFE - from the internets....

at cnn's ireport- one of the comments on debating gay marriage and not allowing it:

"It is fascinating how sacred and religious a marriage title is, but when it falls apart no one cares about religion, they just head for lawyers to resolve the LEGAL issue."

:-)

MY LIFE - tired, busy, good and losing weight....

Yup, losing weight. I refuse to call this successful until I lose 13 pounds more. Ill let you know.

And I took this today:

 

MY LIFE - a ghost from the not so distant past....

So I met someone today I haven't seen in about a year. It was good but also weird. Almost felt for a second someone reset a timer and it was all cool... images flashed in front of me, green and yellow as I watched a film... and to be frank.. I am to tired too feel anything... right now.

In the meantime, meet spaghetti cat.  Yes, I am a year late to this but it's still amazing.

MY LIFE- gay chicken....

So it turns out that I bumped into what seems to be a new phenomena, and if it isn't new, well, it's new to me. It's called the game of Gay Chicken(tm) and there are many videos on you tube on this now. Basically two straight guys look at each other as if they were going ot kiss and go ahead until one of them backs out. Normally it goes like this:

regular gay chicken

And in some very extreme cases, where the guys are indeed hardcore one upping each other this can happen:

gay chicken extreme...

As you can see girls seem to get a kick out of it, and I can assure you, gays are also getting a kick out of this... umm well at least some of us.

In all honesty, this is all but a good sign- people are getting less and less afraid of the "homos" which can only be a good thing(tm).

Of course if you are gay and you are playing gay chicken with a str8 guy, this is considered cheating :-P

Update: Allright, I better stop watching these things....

Funny....

Funnier...

My Life-... in a crunch.. and ....

About a year ago, I sold my Olympus E-3. The E-3 is the "pinaccle" of the 4/3rds format, the "pro" camera in the line up and all that- if we want to believe everything marketing says.  Truth is I had it for six months and I started to hate the interface. And it's not a small camera.... and this and that, so I sold it. 

And a year after, I have bought it back. Why you may ask? As I am starting to shoot more weddings, while I can do that with my little e-420, I realized that for one particular situation I could use all the help I could get to shoot in the dark.  Also I began noticing that though having a great lens helps immensely to the image quality, the E-3 seemed to have these.. um.. "blue crystals" that just made it look like "there"- like you can touch it. And that got me thinking that professionally, I wanted that "extra."  I got a good deal with one of the newer great lenses so I got it back.

But wait, there's more. I also bought a FILM medium format camera from my first photography teacher. Yes, FILM, Can you believe it? Finally I am going to be "a real man" according to some of my film friend lovers. So we'll see what I get out of this. I must say when I got it, I was impressed. Several coworkers pointed out that "wow, it looks like a real camera" and the manual focusing is super fanstic. The E-3 has one of the niciest view finders in the market and this view finder is like twice as nice. We'll see what I do.

But wait, there's even more... Olympus just came out with a camera that quite frankly, is like they asked me "Hey Ricardo, so what do you want in a camera."  It's like a "pro specced e-420" - small, nimble, fast, full articulated LCD/live view, NO more banding at high ISO... 12 megapixies (not that I cared from 10 to 12 really). Uses the same battery of the e-420 and it's fantastic.  The only thing missing here is weather sealing... one day Olympus... probably will do that. In fact, one day I hope they do a true pro specced "e-420/620" that does the great E-3 color, but frankly, this camera has so many pro options and configurations, the price is just a steal. 

ASo I bought it.  And with that, NO MÁS for a while, really. I will admit though, buying the e-620 is a complete utter luxury at this point. This was supposed to be my wedding camera, and not the E-3, but since I bought the E_3 back, my "need a camera for making work better on me" excuse no longer holds.  Well, I am selling two of my other cameras at least, and the weddings in the summer will cover both the E-3, and the 620.

I want to share a photo I got with it. This camera has a few art filters Olympus decided to introduce... I feel a bit ho hum about that but I love the B&W grainy one.  And yes, I barely have time, I am uber crunching at work. Blah.

MY LIFE - I want to be a super hero...

A Holy Paladin preferably.. capable of wearing plate armor, healing friends or striking foes at will, and the ability to have an aura that I can change depending on the situation...

looks like the idealist in me is still alive somewhere, but I can't be a super hero.  I though I had learned this already. I guess I mostly learned it.

MY LIFE - no pain, no gain....

A few things have happened lately that are emotionally painful. I am handling them overall fine as far as not thinking about me being worthless or anything like that, though I have lost some sleep and my stomach is not quite right. I feel this "ominous weight" in my body- kind of weird. A heaviness. Sometimes valuable lessons have to set in through pain it seems, otherwise we don't take them seriously - or so I am beginning to think.

New lesson- if you are about to say something critical to someone that involves human relations (particularly the one you are involved in with them and also ideally), make sure you are cool, you know what you are saying, you have thought it through and you are not (too) resentfull/mad. Consider yourself doing that under those conditions a bit like driving under influence. It won't do you good.

MY LIFE - a thing I think I learned today and a quote...

Let's start with the quote. It's easier:

"I feel like a dog chasing his own tail" - someone undecided about which camera to buy between three models, in a seemingly touch-of-OCD way. I think this quote captures an aspect of the feeling of the indecision OCD can bring.

And now what I think I learned today: I may worship the truth, so I don't want to lie in the name of portraying things as nice and "everyone gets along" if it's going to make a lie. But just because I want to say the truth doesn't mean I can't try to ease the way in which the truth is delivered or prepare and help with the consequences it may bring- the truth by itself can be very often- a very nasty thing on its own. Saying it like that can be like a shot being fired. I think there's a better way to share it without having to fire that shot- at least in a lot of cases.

MY LIFE - best quote so far this year...

that I have bumped into because it was made some time ago. Someone pointed to me to some video game developer blog of X company which I am not going to mention but it's one of the big brands (in the past).  Someone was pointing out how a particular team was long burnt and the few that had a clue on how to make a game were tied up by management. He then described the overall team as:

"They are worse than talentless. They have no passion."

And that made me think... and yes. Passion is more important than talent. And someone talented with no passion is pretty much an undead. Without passion there's no desire to do better, to improve, to move on. Things just fall apart like abandoned houses, cars, boats... Someone with passion and no talent will at least push themselves and either develop the talent or at least bang against the wall with persistence to at least make a dent or two...