The Importance of Mixed Media

Volunteering my personal information on Facebook is no longer a viable way to interact with others or portray myself on the internet. I would rather prefer to be reduced to a profile picture and a series of archived ones. 

There are many limitations to Facebook that don’t really need to be all listed, but what I like about the Blogger format is that I have more control over the look and feel of the content that I’m creating. On Facebook, for example, you can’t italicize something for emphasis. And maybe while that might not seem like enough to abandon a platform, it highlights the aspect that I find the most discouraging: it’s not creative enough for me. 

One of the things that I liked about MySpace was that it gave you the ability to hack the behind the scenes HMTL of your own page so that you could make it look and feel however you’d prefer. You weren’t just relegated to white background, black text. 

So I’m experimenting with a new way to communicate. Instead of posting to Facebook, which often requires little to no thought, or even posting to Instagram for that matter, I’m going to work on putting more effort into communicating in the form of a blog,  such as this. 

I’m on a train heading to Baltimore for a work assignment, and I’m writing on my iPhone because Amtrak WiFi is terrible. I have my wireless keyboard hooked up to my phone, so I’m not typing this with my thumbs. 

But I’m trying to put something together in this article which contains some mixed media.

It’s really simple to reference any video from YouTube. The reason I filmed that is because later there may be a time when we could potentially use that footage for a future project.

The Strangest Rock Star

Charlie was the strangest Rock Star. He lived in his van and traveled place to place, playing shows. He got on stage, played a few songs, shouted out his stage name a few times, and went back to his van. 

He didn’t like interacting with people. Other than emails to the venues to schedule shows, he hardly dealt with anyone at all.  He’d park as close to the venue as possible, then walk on stage nearly when his set began, and would leave straight back for his van after his set after spending about an hour at his merch table, usually while another band played. 

I’m not sure why Charlie was so averse to people, but his music became extremely popular. And no one could really figure out why it was so popular. I guess it’s because he was so removed from the world at large, that it sounded a little alien, unlike anything else that others were making. 

I don’t suppose Charlie was really listening. He didn’t even really do music for the music; it was an excuse to travel. It helped him afford it. 

He produced all of his music in his van, parked watching beautiful sunsets. He used the scenery around him at the places he found for inspiration. There he was, on a beach in California, by himself all afternoon without a soul in sight. 

A few nights later, he played that song in front of a rather busy crowd in San Francisco. The crowd was mesmerized. When the song was over, there was nearly a 10 second pause before the applause. Charlie didn’t measure success by the roar of the applause but rather by the time it took for the crowd to accept that the song was over. 

The Tao of Pinball

WHen I was young, my father would take me to the arcade on Friday nights, which as also the night we’d do the grocery shopping. In the summer, we would go to the arcade first, but in the winter we’d leave the food in the car and play after the food shopping. 

At the arcade, my father gravitated toward the pinball games and would station himself among a group of about three games that he would periodically rotate between. In any case, I always knew where to find him. And I would return back to base when I ran out of coins. 

He usually handed me about two dollars. I think that there were times when he would get a little pissed off if I came back too many times asking for more coins. This was because not only was I costing him more money, i was distracting and interrupting him from his game. So in order to prevent myself from having to return to him empty handed, I learned to focus on only the games I was good at. 

I would run game on SF2, beating large crowds of people. But if there were someone else playing SF2 or even a few people playing who were better than me, then I’d defer to the tedious task of swatting space bugs in Galaga. Between these two games, I was capable of handling my business on nights at the arcade. 

ABOUT GALAGA

The first time I exceeded a million in Galaga was in 1997 at Cutler’s Records on a Sunday. I had just finished a shift at Claire’s Cornercopia and the Shubert had a show that afternoon, so everyone and their parents and their grandparents were out and about, looking for an order of the acclaimed risotto. It was a busy shift, and I was done by 4, with two hours to spare before the Record Store closed. So I drifted over there, still heightened by the fast paced demanding environment I had just departed from. 

Galaga is a game set in patterns which increases in speed only at three points in the game. The first two rounds are slow, and it then picks up immediately. That speed only noticeably increases at one other time in the game. These speed increase can be customized within the programming of the game, so that if you go to one arcade, your ship may move faster or slower, the extra ships would be set at higher or lower intervals. That sort of thing.

Generally, one plays video games for points, and Galaga is a game which rewards those who can handle the grind of repeating the exact same tactics,  round after round, with room for several different types of variation depending on the patterns of the game, which rotate within a pattern of their own. 

The grind of the game is as follows. Galaga often gets mistaken for Space Invaders, and it’s actually really similar but with a few more nuisances. The ships don’t immediately appear in the block that approaches you. And rather than get closer to your ship, the enemies (bugs, as we may call them) fly at you in various patterns. The blue ones do a loop at the bottom of the screen. The red ones bomb dive towards you. They both shoot projectiles which will end your turn, as well as contact with them as they loop scroll and reappear at the top after they’ve made their pass at you. 

As the ships appear on the screen, Once they arrive in their set location,  they move from side to side in a patternistic glide. 

And there were way more points from completing each bonus round, which cycled between five variations, each differing in patterns and characters. You get extra ships for surpassing certain points milestone, and there does come a point where no amount of extra points is going to win you any more free ships. La