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

Bear with me, here: I'm currently at the mercy of a persistent dose of Tylenol Allergy Sinus Day Time which, despite it's up and about-sounding name, has me more doped up than a sorority girl on club night.

Thinking about writing, specifically the writing of mine being held in limbo on an Apple store hard drive, patiently waiting to be recovered and dropped into the body of Norrin Radd. Specifically, I'm wondering if I shouldn't toss it all to the ether, making room both physically and emotionally for new work. The old pieces I care about I have access to, either online or in print, and despite dutifully keeping a folder for rough drafts, I haven't yet quite learned how to go back to a piece months later to see what can be salvaged. What keeps me from writing more is my inability to revise - what keeps me from revising is hating every sentence within days of putting it down. Progress was made during the stint of twenty lines a day, but that sort of stagnated with the death/handy excuse of my iBook kicking it. I can handle short stuff - I do that pretty much all day for a living - but longer work is something I haven't tried for a long time.

So I'm thinking, why not use the new computer as an excuse to for a new take on writing? Those old files are just words on (a representation of) a page, and hardly worth keeping if no one's going to see them. And as I know me well enough to know no one's going to see them, I might as well offer them back up to the ideaspace. A little burnt sacrifice never hurt anybody, after all.

posted by chris  # 6:03 PM 0 comments

In the end, all it took to get my new laptop was the threat of legal smackdown. Remember that, kids: the trick to dealing with assholes is all in proper use of the words "federal crime" in a sentence.

I am now the proud owner of a silvery-shiny 15" Powerbook that I've taken to calling "Norrin Radd." As that's a bit cumbersome, I might end up shortening to one word - because when you're naming an appliance, how the words roll off the tongue is a prime concern. At any rate, my new baby came loaded with a couple thousand dollars worth of design software, making the month-long wait kinda sorta worth it. Now I just need to get my data from Doombot, which is floating helplessly on an Apple store hard drive, and it'll be back to business as usual. Only this time, actually doing stuff.

Back to it.

posted by chris  # 6:26 PM 0 comments

Forgot to mention this a while ago, then continued forgetting for, um, several weeks: there haven't been any new installments of the twenty lines a day thing I was doing because there hasn't been a computer to write them on. My ibook, lovingly referred to as Doombot when no one was around, had a massive logic board failure and died about a month ago. I'm still working on getting a new machine, though that's turning into the sort of thing one can only properly call "an ordeal".

Okay, you could probably slide the word "fucking" in there as well.

At any rate, Doombot is dead, and I've been using that as the excuse/reason for not doing the writing thing. Chris Lamb, ladies and gentlemen: lazy, but at least slightly more than half the time honest about it.

posted by chris  # 10:22 AM 0 comments

Ben10: Battle Ready is up at cartoonnetwork.com. It's the first game I did for Pop, the project who's hellishly short production schedule also marked my slow shift of accepting all this as What I Do. It's weird, seeing it finally up and running and out of our hands. The first day it was up I'd load it on my screen at work just to look at it, all this dumb shit from my head made real on a screen.

It's too easy, first off; we never had a chance to find the delicate balance between too damn hard and too damn easy. Some of the levels feel nearly vacant, just a space to pass through on your way to the end, while some are teeming with robot goons bent on your destruction. When the chance came up to fix all that with an update that went live on Thursday, I fought and begged for the chance to go back through the levels and update the robot population a bit. When Mike shot it down under the time-honored clause of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," it sent a nasty wave of self-righteousness through me. How dare he fuck with my game, leave my game to go out in the world less than it could have been, fnar, fnar, fnar.

Thankfully, that only lasted a good five minutes or so before I realized how right he was.

The day after I was hired on full time with Pop, we had a pretty massive party. Lots of friends of the company, lots of old employees turned freelancers. I spent most of the evening talking to one of the latter, and he gave me some of the best advice for working here, or for doing any sort of work for hire gig, really: don't get attached. Past a certain point, you can't think of it as your game or your anything else for that matter. There's gonna come a point when, after dealing with a committee of different opinions, different wants, and different voices, you have to either stop caring or go completely insane. Mike, our genius programmer who Gets Shit Done, told me this little mantra of Scott, our occasional Illustrator of Doom: It's only a stupid game. It's only a stupid game. You reach a point where you have to let go of the idea and potential of what the game could have been, and realize that, as long as you're doing the work for some body else, it's only going to be what the folks with the money say it is.

So, there's stuff I'd fix, but that's okay. It's still bigger, prettier, and better put together than 90% of what CN wants you to pay money for. And for the first time out of the gate, I can live with that. Play it here and let me know what you think.

posted by chris  # 1:34 AM 0 comments

posted by chris  # 12:40 PM 0 comments

Just to say: between the roar of fireworks shaking the window panes and the mass of voices singing and shouting outside and in the surrounding apartments, the mental image of the city declaring war on Dick Clark and his yearly ritual of rejuvenation involving the skinning of years off the ends of the thousands of lives gathered in Times Square to watch his hideous Rite Of The Disco Ball Descending is enough to justify every tourist who's stopped me along Bowery in the last two weeks to ask if they're in "the Village" yet.

New York, I'm yours.

posted by chris  # 12:26 AM 0 comments

How 2005 ends: sitting on the edge of a futon in robot-mode, stabbing at a borrowed keyboard during a break from a marathon push through season five of Angel. This is the good one, apparently, and so far the appearance of Spike has gone a long way to offset the mumbled half-acting of David Borenzahozenhausen, the guy what plays Angel. If part of me must be a seventeen-year-old girl spending her date nights closing a bookshop in the mall, at least it is easily satisfied.

I spent Christmas in Huntsville, playing catch up with my now scattered to the four winds family and swinging between disappointment and disgust. Far too little time with my mom and brothers, far too much spent around dad's (admittedly nice) shake-n-bake family and my religious fanatic aunts. And that's not even going in to Christmas night spent quietly boiling on my side of a bar booth, spitting out more bile than I should have while some how managing to hold back the worst of it. I used to wonder why Muffet, the oldest of my mom's sisters and the last one before me to light out for the territories only came to visit for three days out of the year. I don't any more.

Home now, with my city around me and the strange comfort that comes from buildings taller than ten stories and local commercials about something other than gun shows and church groups. The wash of Christmas is already mostly pushed out of sight and mind, making room for New Year's. With everything going on, the feeling of global reset hardly had time to catch up with me - it took reading Bruce Mau on the train to get my hands tingling at the thought of it. Now, though, with six minutes and counting, I'm totally on board with Team Change.

I've said this here before, and rather recently I think: oh-three was the year we thought we ruled the world, my friends and I, when events and people seemed to fall in line with whatever happened to be crossing our minds at the moment. Then oh-four came like a boot, sweeping the rug out from everything and one while setting the stage for oh-five, the year we started dressing like adults. I was going to pontificate on what the new year would bring with it, but hey, fuck it, y'know? If this last year was less about gaining ground than earning it, then let this one be about application. Before conquering the world, let's have one worth owning.

With that in mind, I come to my one tradition: first song of the year. Last year's was part battle plan, part farewell to the year before's shit-kickery with Johnny-Boy's "You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve." I thought about having it again - "This frequency's my universe" still gets me between the eyes - but decided something different was in order. The same trick rarely works twice, and all that. So we're kicking things off this time with Costello's "Jack of All Parades". Slow, yes, and more than a little mixed-message, but the whole "Give in, don't give up" take appeals to me right now. It's more apt than the incidental music from a DVD menu screen, at any rate.

Give in, don't give up. That'll do nicely.

posted by chris  # 12:23 AM 2 comments