Archive for February, 2009

A bevy and a boatload

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

It’s after 2:30 in the morning and I just got home from Theatresports a little while ago. I’m physically tired but not quite mentally ready to go to sleep yet, so I figure I may as well update this thing.

Theatresports was thoroughly fun tonight, if unremarkable. That is to say, I don’t think our team hit any of our scenes out of the park, but I think we did some respectable scenework and gave the audience an enjoyable show. I felt good about most of the stuff I did, as I’ve been feeling about my improv in general lately… I think my scenework as a whole has been improving and even when I’m not being clever or funny I’m managing to listen more, be more sincere and vulnerable and generally do a better job of figuring out what the needs of the story are. It didn’t hurt that in many of my scenes I was partnered with a mega-veteran from planet awesome, and I felt like she and I were syncing our characters up well for the most part.

Our final scene of the evening was a narrated ballet, something I have no legitimate business being a part of, but as it was a reenactment of a first date and I was the only guy on our team there was no real way around my being heavily involved in it. (Of course, the girl playing opposite me had an entire lifetime of dance training, and even received genuine applause for her first scene, something which rarely happens in this style of improv.) I know I didn’t do anything remotely believable as ballet but I’m pleased with myself that I didn’t wimp or cop out by attempting a parody of the form, but rather gave it my all and sold my notion of a ballet as best I could. I was exhausted and sweaty by the end of it and will probably be sore in the morning, but at least the audience got something committed rather than an excuse.

This is all on the heels of the Seattle Festival of Improv last weekend, which was a great time but one in which I totally overexerted myself. Friday was the Master Class with improv gurus (and stars of the legendary form Bassprov) Joe Bill and Mark Sutton, and while the 20 or so of us in the class didn’t get more than a few minutes each to perform I managed to get one of the few kudos notes given for one of my scenes, which felt really good. I either performed in or saw shows at three different places that evening, and then stayed out at the party until after 3 AM, so I was completely wrecked for the classes Saturday morning… I’m still glad I took them, though.

The morning class was on improv “special effects” and there was just a bevy and a boatload of useful little techniques to take away from that one. In the afternoon I had another class with Joe Bill and although it was a bit echoing of the Master Class I like that I’m always challegend by those guys. I showed up to help out with tech for the evening shows at the theatre but it turns out I wasn’t really needed in any significant way, and I was exhausted and as a result feeling kind of cranky for being in that situation. So I missed the party that evening and also the Dust Up on Sunday, but it’s probably for the best I stayed in and recuperated.

In other news, Bank of America “upgraded” my credit card this past week to a “Visa Signature” card, which is basically the same as the card I had but with some esoteric rich-person features I’m positive I will never use, and a hidden credit limit instead of the nicely explicit one I had before. They called me after I went some time without activating it, and although I’ve ultimately decided to keep it I was pretty miffed that I couldn’t persuade them to just issue me another Platinum card, as this isn’t the first time a bank has decided to upgrade my card without my approval. Last time was Citibank and they tried to sandbag me with an annual fee, which I was having none of and canceled the card. This wasn’t worth the trouble of me canceling it… but I really wish the banks would stop doing things clearly in their own interests without my consent and wrapping it in the guise of doing me a favour.

The iPhone game I’ve been working on is getting very close to being ready for release. I still need to implement the tutorial, finish the front-end menus and add some sound and bonus/unlockable content and general polish, but the finish line is in sight. I’ve been having more difficulty than I expected getting reliable people I know to play-test it… if you’re interested, please shoot me an e-mail.

Nearly an hour later and I think I’m finally ready for bed. So that’s all for now…

Dan.

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Germinating well

Monday, February 16th, 2009

My casual game has been germinating well. It’s about ready for playtesting, so if anyone’s interested then send me your iPhone’s serial number (it’s in iTunes on the iPhone’s summary screen when you plug it in), and I’ll send you a build. It’s a tile-based word game, in the same vein as Scrabble, but faster-paced and more twitchy. I think it’s turning out to be pretty fun!

One of the downsides is that it’s requiring more art than I’d initially planned, which means I’m spending a lot of time in Photoshop just trying to draw things that are remotely passable as squirrels, alligators and spiders. Not easy when I’m so used to working with professional video-game artists.

This weekend is the Seattle Festival of Improv, and I’ll be taking a few workshops there, as well as hopefully checking out some of the shows.

My network hard drive broke. For the most part I was only using it for backup purposes, but I’m not 100% sure of what’s on there. I may crack it open and see if I can’t salvage its contents somehow. Still… annoying.

Not much else going on at the moment… more news when it happens!

Dan.

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Reek of delish

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

People seem to still be downloading iProv, which is cool. The Seattle Festival of Improv Theater is coming up, and I may try to promote it there. I’ve started work on a casual game in the meantime… it’s coming along well.

I’d been away from Unexpected a couple of weeks, and when I came back to play this past weekend I was amused to find a certain photo printed out on the managing director’s desk, with the caption “UP alum Joel McHale gives Dan Posluns a noogie”. It never takes much of an absence for me to feel the nostalgia when I return.

My washer finally got repaired today, nearly two weeks after I first set out to have it fixed. The repairman missed our first appointment because he was sick and I was never notified. He came two days later and identified the problem, but it required ordering a replacement part. He was supposed to come back with it on Monday, but phoned and told me it had arrived busted and they were going to have to order another one. Finally, today, I was able to do laundry again and stop smelling like a hobo.

In the end the affair cost me nearly three hundred dollars, with about half of that just for a new dial control. Admittedly cheaper than buying a new washer, but not enough to keep me from feeling really jilted if anything else goes wrong with it.

The Superbowl was this past weekend, and for someone who’s normally not very entertained by football, I found it enthralling. In fact, the game was probably more interesting than the commercials, which were an unusually paltry crop this year. Some were worse than others, but the one that angered up the blood most was the one that was criminally ignorant of some of the most fundamentally basic geometry:

Someone at the party was following Wil Wheaton on Twitter and I think he summed it up best: “It’s like a million geometry nerds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

My parents sent me a very excellent birthday gift I meant to blog about some time ago. One part of it was a bottle of the jalapeno vodka my grandmother’s brother brought with him in his most recent (and in all likelihood final) visit from Russia. Unlike normal vodka (which is normally pretty flavourless and used mainly as a mixer), this stuff has a really nice, mild taste to it that makes it great for shots. Plus the jalapeno sitting at the bottom of the bottle is all kinds of awesome.

The other, far more valuable part was a package of slices of the salami obtained from the St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, which is more than an hour’s drive west of Toronto. This is an aged, all-beef Mennonite salami that is unlike anything else – I need to keep it shut up in a cupboard or my entire condo will reek of delish. I’ve been rationing it carefully but I’m already more than a quarter of a way through the stuff. My parents had to sneak it across the border (beef is prohibited) when they drove down to Florida for their vacation and shipped it out from there. It took nearly a month to arrive, and I had assumed that it had been confiscated by the post office (since it had a Canadian return address on it), but it was a very pleasant surprise the day when it turned up.

I could use more pleasant surprises! Get on that, blogosphere.

Dan.

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