Monday, November 27, 2006

HOW I SPENT MY THANSKGIVING VACATION

Hope you all had a great holiday. I sure did.

But now I'm sick at home with the flu, tho. So my 4 day weekend has become a 5 day weekend. Feel bad as I was going to head to Utah tomorrow for a marathon tweak session. Oh well, we'll do what we can with video chat and net play and I'll try to head out next week.

So yeah, the holiday was great. Saw a few flicks with my wife and brother (who came down from Los Angeles). One of my favorite parts about Thanksgiving and Xmas holidays is seeing movies. I could not talk my wife into checking out Bond, which is what I really wanted to see. But as you married folks out there understand, sometimes you gotta give up a bit to get alot :)

So instead of Bond and The Fountain (both of which I will see sometime this week if I feel up to it), we saw:

Bobby was a good movie but it was also an odd movie. It was well made and kept me interested the whole time. BUT I really wanted to see a film about the life and/or impact of Robery Kennedy. I know little about him as he was killed before I was born and I was eager to get an entertaining history lesson. Sadly, Bobby ain't that. 95% of the stories that lead up to the shooting of Bobby Kennedy seem to have nothing to do with Kennedy. The stories told are about folks who were in the hotel the night he was shot, yes. But you struggle to figure out what most of those stories have to do with Bobby Kennedy. Sure, if you really dig deep you can connect a few of the stories to the ideals and ideas that Kennedy preached about, but that's only for a few of the sub plots and even then, you're digging semi-deep to make those connections. Still, good flick. Interesting and Entertaining the whole time thru. Catch it on video. And hey, it made me and the wife tivo a bunch of Bobby Kennedy docs coming on this month as we DO want to know more about him.

We also saw:



The Queen was also entertaining but left you with a sort of 'meh' feeling. Maybe if you give a shit about the Royals it would have more impact. But as the whole film seemed to be a question on the validity of the Royal Family in modern times, and since I have always thought the Royals- as an institution in our modern times- are pointless at best, and arrogant at worst, it was hard for me to care about the film's struggling with this very issue. My mind about the Royals has been made up since my mom- who does dig the Royal Family- woke us up at 5am to watch the Princess Di wedding some 20 something years ago. It was neat I guess but even as a kid, the Royals just seemed a concept that did not fit with modern times. That said, there IS something cool about an institution that has been around for over 1000 years. The film does make you at least respect that aspect of tradition.

Anyway, what else did I see? Oh yeah, I saw this:


For you younger readers out there, that's Geroge Burns as GOD in the movie OH GOD!

Ahem...anyway!

So the point is, me and my brother took some stuff into our lungs over the holiday that shifted the way I saw the world. I don't do it all that often and when I do do it, I take alot of the stuff in as I want to see how far I can go. But this time, I'm totaly out of my mind, time is shifting all over the place ('temporal hallucinations' is what my brother called it) and I'm standing on my deck looking up at the stars and suddenly I become aware of God. As an agnostic, this is a rare thing to be sure. So I also become aware that the reason I can see/sense him is because of the shift my mind has taken. And I ask him:

How come you are in here? How come you make us go thru this shift in order to see you? Why do you hide from us?

And I hear a voice in my head that says: I'm not hiding from you. It is you who is hiding from me.

And then I see a shooting start.

I shit you now.

Wow, that was some good shit!

Ok, speaking of shit, that's what I feel like. Gonna go lay down and try to sleep this thing off.

Talk to you guys soon. Hope you all had a great holiday too!

David

ps. thanks for the heads up on the Wikepedia entry. I have deleted that last paragraph only because it simply was not truthful. I am 1000% ok with people ragging on me thru the entry but I'm not cool at all when they post stuff that is not true. For the record, I was never fired off GOD OF WAR 2 and while some members of the team may find me hard to work with- as I find some members of the team hard to work with as well-I think we all respect each other and what we each bring to the table. So the working relationship with the team was never the reason I did not direct GOD OF WAR 2. The reason I did not direct GOD OF WAR 2 was that my personal life was suffering in a significant way because I was never home. And my health was suffering as I was never at the gym. As much as I love my work, I love my wife and kids more and was not going to sacrifice them again. And the PSP project died because it was just not a good match with the developer (who was slammed with the epic that is WarHawk). So we did something me and Scott are passionate about anyway, which is the small games space.