Gabriel will be gone for the week, having earned given a brief respite from his toils here at the Arcade. In addition to truly massive amounts of storyboarding and character design for Precipice, he just did the cover for the new MC Frontalot album, and then wrestled a bison. Immediately afterward! He's exhausted.
So, he is going to visit Hawaii for a brief interval. I told him that they cook pigs underground over there, and he seemed intrigued by that. They were going to go a couple years ago, tickets were purchased and reservations made, but I believe that Gabriel the Younger did not consult them when preparing his own itinerary.
I will steer the ship in the meantime, dispensing our storehouse of content in hearty dollops until he returns. There is a brief storyline entitled The Pilgrimage going up in his absence (about how I ended up at CES while he was leaving for Hawaii) which concludes itself the Monday after next. In the meantime, enjoy this sort of introduction/sort of not to the series re: how Gabriel is dumb.
E3 wasn't so much work as it was... It's hard to say what it was, which I suppose is another reason to dismantle it. It was more like our Moose Lodge, a masculine retreat minus the bongos and face paint. Part of the reason I'm going to CES is to scope it out as a possible replacement. The optimal surrogate would be the Tokyo Game Show, but the fabulous expense and also the dangers posed by steam-powered robot street gangs are areas of deep concern.
Gabriel provided me with a kind of shopping list of items to check while I am down there, chief among them the dual Blu-Ray/HD-DVD equipment on offer. I'm overjoyed to see it so early - I was also relieved to see that Warner Bros was in a position to offer a single disc that supports both formats, another way to execute an end-run around this anti-consumer hokum we're being made to endure. Someone needs to win, or they need to be disarmed.
I saw a really interesting item at Kotaku about Sony choosing to include files for portable players right there on the Blu-ray disc, with no rip. A policy like this, executed at a high level, would have my allegiance in an instant. My DVD-Audio version of the Splinter Cell soundtrack (which is unbelievable, by the by) did a similar thing, including the entire album right there in the root encoded straight into these gigantic aacPlus files. It's brilliant, brilliant - but it doesn't strike me as an especially Sony move. Their love affair with MagicGate did more to lose them the portable audio market than anything else. And more recently, their dogged insistence that your video files not leverage the entire screen on the PSP, in order to protect the UMD format - another somber headstone in their haunted format graveyard.
It's a tremendous move, one that would mend a lot of fences.
(CW)TB out.
