B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

Things that are best, #2,615: the video for "Helena," by My Chemical Romance.

Funeral procession dance numbers, complete with umbrellas. Post-mortem ballet. The band that Hot Topic built, complete with a lead singer who's been shot through all of Johnny Depp's best Tim Burton filters. Predictable to perfection, right up to dead and lovely opening her eyes on the last beat before the refrain.

No, really. The band's no good, and they'll never be this great or self-aware again. Go watch.

posted by chris  # 3:54 PM 2 comments

November is nearly here, meaning National Novel Writing Month will soon be upon us. Or rather, upon me. And to celebrate the excitement of an entire month's worth of free time spent crouched over a keyboard while desperately counting every last word, I've decided to let you, the humble Bondphone reader, in on the action with a rare chance to see how much worse my writing is before it meets the rest of the world. Yes, this year I'm parting the curtain and setting up an entirely different blog to post my novel as it comes out, paragraph by agonizing paragraph. I'll probably leave comments on as well, so you can make fun throughout the month, or tell me what a great deal you got on your air conditioner or how I should totally check out your cello fetish site. You're not just spambots to me, you're fans.

There's nothing up yet, obviously, as it's still October, but starting November first, you can go here to see how sausages are made. Readers are also strongly encouraged to start betting pools as to how long it will be before this brilliant notion of mine is dropped by the wayside.

posted by chris  # 11:15 AM 1 comments

So, I got this job. I design video games now.

No, for reals.

I work for a company called Pop&Co. based out of the Meat Packing District of Manhattan's West Side. We're on the fifth floor of an old warehouse-turned-office space with a view of the Hudson and lovely-from-a-distance New Jersey. I ride a freight elevator (that is also our lobby) every morning that's operated by a guy named Berman. The artwork in the elevator consists of two murals of racy postcards from distant lands, a shot of the Eiffel Tower taken from between a woman's legs, that sort of thing. This is how you spell "professional" when the name of the neighborhood you work in makes little boys and bartenders snigger.

There are about ten of us on full-time at Pop and a huge cast of freelancers coming and going. It's a tight operation, with little room for do-overs or mistakes. It's nice, though; you know the folks you work with and you know them well, and help is always a holler across the office away.

But anyway: My job, in addition to the catch-allness that comes with the words "production assistant," is to design games. I write the initial document, making everything work on paper before the client or the programmer sees it. Later, when we get into visuals, I sketch out the level designs themselves. It's intensive, insane work, and probably the most fun I've ever had while getting paid. Creative writing that pushes all my puzzle-solving buttons? Hell and yes, please. There are two games with me all over them, at the moment: one for a new show that I can't talk about, and one for Cartoon Network's Puffy Ami Yumi Show.

This isn't sounding very exciting at all, is it? Okay, try this: a couple of weeks after I started, we had new carpet put in the office. Carpet that is the greenest of green and the next best thing to astroturf you can have without being considered a fire hazard. Once the dust settles on a few things, we start designing holes so we can turn the office into a miniature golf course. The week after carpet came in, we had a party for a stuffed animal maker (Stuffer? Stuffist? Stuffinista?) that went into the wee hours, ending with me and the dude behind Pac Manhattan talking about We Love Katamari Damacy and City of Heroes and sneaking contraband smoke out the windows. I think it was those games, at least.

And today I sat quietly in a conference room on the forty-first floor of a building in the heart of Times Square, observing how Business Gets Done and watching the boats and smoke glide over the river.

There are worse jobs, y'know.

posted by chris  # 6:41 PM 0 comments

I appreciate the offers and suggestions of spambot-blocking software for the comments section, but really, I don't think it's yet bad enough to worry about. And besides, there's something nice about thusfar only getting high brow spambots with interests in classical music rather than trying to make anything on me grow.

But still, thanks.

posted by chris  # 5:47 PM 0 comments

New job, new phone. Bondphone the third is is a Treo 650. The picutres it takes come out a little...limey? But they're better quality, which is all I really wanted. And the phone itself beats the old Motorola number by being designed for actual human use.

Lots I've been meaning to talk about, but September smashed all of my free time into little bits and distributed them evenly between three jobs. One job now, and that's a story unto itself. In the meantime, familiarize yourself with these guys. The site's at least year or two out of date, but you'll get the idea. That? That's where daddy works.

Next time: video games, water guns, or tea over coffee.

posted by chris  # 10:18 AM 0 comments