ShupFace

If only life were as simple as an RPG. Got a problem? Roll characteristic + skill! If your skill level isn’t high enough you can always upgrade. I’m trying to decide which skills to upgrade at university. Part of my problem is that I don’t know what industry areas I’d be good at or enjoy working in.

If this was Shadowrun I’d be rolling my Intuition or Logic to find a solution.

Looking for a job sucks and I know I’d rather go back to university because it’s easy and structured. This is not a great reason to study. If I do go back to uni I need to make sure that further study will make me more eligible for employment.

Current ideas for study:

• Design
• Journalism
• Creative Writing
• Media Arts and Production
• Theology

Got a text message from the gallery letting me know I didn’t get the job. Feeling a little crushed, but also relieved because the place was super posh and I just wouldn’t have fit in. Still waiting to hear back from another place.

My plan for tomorrow is to look through all the stores at Westfield Parramatta and see if any of them are currently recruiting. Super yay.

I just finished Saints Row 2 and I had a few thoughts about it. The first and most obvious of which is that it’s going to be seen as a poor man’s Grand Theft Auto. This is not an unreasonable perception considering the basic premise is the same. That is, you drive cars and shoot people.

In many ways GTA does it better. The graphics are more polished in GTA IV, cars look better and deaths are more realistic. But, surprisingly, Saints Row 2 trumped GTA IV in the missions department. The missions in SR2 are more varied, more interesting and more fun than many of those in GTA IV. This is in part because the storyline is more fun.

In a similar style to GTA: San Andreas, SR2 has you playing a gangster, looking to establish yourself as the big man around town. You are the boss of your own gang and everything you do furthers the reputation and power of yourself or your gang. GTA IV, as I’ve griped before, had you playing a morally challenged assassin who spends all his time working for other people. The satisfaction of SR2, aside from mastering the challenging missions, is the establishment of your gang as a real power in the city.

There is also a significantly higher degree of customisation in SR2. I think this is mainly because SR2 is a sequel and so they were able to add content to an engine they had already built. The difference in volume of content from GTA III to Vice City to San Andreas is staggering.

Overall I wouldn’t recommend Saints Row 2 over Grand Theft Auto IV. But I would say that if you’ve played GTA and you’re happy for more of the same then SR2 is for you.

I’m a proud, card-carrying geek. I read comics, play video games and watch sci-fi. And now I role play too.

I recently started playing an RPG called Shadowrun with some old friends from high school. I’d been pushing to get a game together for a while and it turned out two of the guys were already playing with other friends of theirs, so we set up a second game.

Shadowrun is a mix of fantasy and cyberpunk. Magic, orks and elves feature alongside bionic arms and virtual reality. My character is a pixie mage, Oberon, who spends all his time on the astral plane hanging out with spirits. I’ve only encountered one other character in astral space and I ‘geeked’ him with one hit.

Cat watched some of our first game and decided she’d quite like to join in. We made her character based on the concept of a ‘hooker with a heart of gold’, but Cat came up with the brilliant idea of having an escort service that doubles as security. In her first game she killed two bikers all on her lonesome.

We’ve only played the two games so far and I’ve already learned that discretion is the better part of valour. Not that I’ve actually been hurt at all. Like all the best lessons, I’ve learned from the example of others. In our first game Eddy charged two characters wielding guns and they shot him to pieces, despite his impeccable skills. In our second game Nick and the two noobs got themselves shot up by a biker gang. I’ve come to the conclusion that letting people shoot you is a rookie mistake.

I started this year with the plan to become a teacher. I enrolled in the Masters of Teaching and began studying in March, but I quickly realised I didn’t actually want to become a teacher. I came to this conclusion mostly because I hate education theory, but also because I don’t think I have the passion the job requires. So I scrapped the teaching plan, dropped out of uni and went back to the drawing board.

Unfortunately the drawing board is pretty much blank right now. I want to practice art, but art doesn’t put bread on the table. I decided to collect the dole and look for menial jobs while I work out what I want to do. It turns out however that the welfare process is more labyrinthine than I had anticipated and weeks later I have still not received remuneration. What’s more, I have found the process of searching and applying for jobs generally rubbish. The newspaper and most job search websites seem to be for executives and managerial positions, people with experience. There is very little entry level stuff.

All the same, I’ve managed to apply for all sorts of jobs, including retail, childcare, market research but the one thing I never expected to happen was to find a job at a gallery. Yesterday while browsing the nets, I found an ad on a website looking for a gallery assistant. The ad was only nine hours old, so I emailed my resume and got a call back at 8am this morning. I have an interview tomorrow afternoon and I’m in with a real shot at being employed in the arts.

Wish me luck.

2010 is “The Year Of Art”.

Last year I had work in two different group shows, one at ESP Gallery in Marrickville and the other at Macquarie University Gallery. The shows were successful, but in both cases the works exhibited were from the previous year. I didn’t produce any new work in 2009.

In 2010 I aim to produce and exhibit new work.

So far this year I am already curating a show, Living Space, for At The Vanishing Point under their Emerging Curator Mentorship Program. I also have a new sculptural work, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, in Hidden: A Rookwood Sculpture Walk out at Rookwood Cemetery. And I’ve started making some new work for a joint show I’m organising at ESP Gallery with my friend Sach Catts.

In addition to the new work for ESP, I’m working on putting together a solo exhibition, a showcase of my performance based practice. I’d like it to be mainly new work, but with a few old favourites in there perhaps. I want a solo show for 2010.

Because 2010 is “The Year Of Art”.

I was reading a review of Mass Effect 2 over at Gamasutra and this really jumped out at me:

In a recent Gamasutra interview, BioWare’s Adrien Cho said the team “wanted to make sure that absolutely every issue [critics and players] brought up was addressed.” In that light, the changes make sense; almost all of them result in less hassle. They also decrease the player’s input in how the game is played, at least after the initial class selection.

So are these systemic changes good or bad, on balance? It depends on what you liked (or didn’t) about the first game. If Mass Effect was a sci-fi shooter saddled with excess RPG micromanagement, Mass Effect 2 is the ideal evolution. If Mass Effect was an RPG that tips its hat to third-person action games, Mass Effect 2 may be less satisfying than expected.

While I complained about all the talking in Dragon Age and avoided all the side missions, I have the opposite problem with Mass Effect 2. It feels like a cover shooter with some RPG elements tacked on. I like the core and loyalty missions, but after a while the gameplay just starts to get a bit same-same: shoot, shoot, shoot. There are no levels like Noveria, from the first Mass Effect, requiring diplomacy and conversation.

I also hate the new resources mini-game, but I can’t decide if it’s worse than driving the Mako all over the place.

Tonight we learned about the Trinity at church. The sermon was pretty decent and when we came home Cat and I looked up the Athanasian Creed for more details. I was momentarily sidetracked when another hit on my Google search led me to a Unitarian website.

Unitarians believe that there is one God, but no Trinity. They believe that the Holy Spirit is another name for God and Jesus is a completely unique individual, but is ultimately still just a man. On the front page of their website is a small list of verses commonly used to support Trinitarian doctrine.

John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am”, and John 10:30, “I and my father are one”, are both quoted and an argument is made for why neither statement should be read as Jesus saying he is God. In neither explanation of the verse do they mention that in both cases the Jews wanted to stone Jesus for blaspheming. We know that it is possible to read his words as blasphemy because the Jews say it outright in 10:33, “We are not stoning you for any of these [miracles],” replied the Jews, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” It’s no good claiming they misunderstood. A skilled speaker, teacher and all round learned dude like Jesus would have known exactly the impact his words would have. If he is not one with God why would he skirt the very edge of blasphemy like that?

Then I noticed a link to more Verses Commonly Used to Try to Support the Doctrine of the Trinity. The number of verses alone (seventeen in the old testament and eighty-nine in the new testament) is a persuasive argument for the Trinity. You can argue that every single one is a mistranslation or misunderstanding, but after a while the argument starts to wear a little thin.

So I don’t often gush about Cathrine. It just seems crass to use the public forum of the internet to boast about how great my girlfriend is. I tell her in private moments that I love her and that I think she’s the bee’s knees. But today I’m going to tell you one of the reasons she’s so great.

Cathrine has this way of directing my usually scattered brain and helping me to be productive. We’ve been talking about art a lot since she got back from the Philippines. With her help and support I came up with some ideas for a show of painting based performance work (or is that performance based painting work?). In the last two weeks these ideas have started coming to fruition at a pace unseen before in my practice. I am usually a slow boiler. Ideas have to spend time percolating in my brain for months before they ever make it into reality. This description may give you the impression that percolation is necessary, some kind of distillation process, I’m not sure if this is true.

In the last week I have bought wood and tools, used my new tools to cut the wood to size and paint it white. Some time in the next few days I will begin the performances that involve these wooden canvases. I am feeling my usual mix of nerves and excitement in the lead up to the actual performance. Let’s hope all goes well.

I have been playing Dragon Age: Origins, the new game from Bioware. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it except that I’m moderately enjoying it. It’s not quite up to Bioware’s usual high standard, but then neither was Jade Empire. I guess it can be a bit hit and miss.

My initial response is that the game has too much talking. The storyline is cool, but there is still too much talking. People just do not stop yak yak yakking away. This can be boring. I want the short version. Demonspawn threatening life as we know it? Got it. I understand that this is someone’s idea of nuanced story telling, but it just isn’t compelling enough to keep my attention. I want to be killing stuff more than I want to listen to their talk.

The power system and controls work reasonably well. The fighting system is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from most bioware rpg’s (Mass Effect excepted). The team approval thing was okay, but not amazing. I do dig that they will turn against you or leave if you push them too far or do something they can’t abide. The skills were a bit meh at times. You pick up quite a few over twenty levels and I think it would have been nice if there were more passive skills and boosts.

I haven’t finished my first playthrough yet, but overall it’s been a positive experience so far. I do expect Mass Effect 2 to be vastly superior though.