Spiffworld | Blog

Here is “Still Alive“, my take on what that song (originally written by Jonathan Coulton for the game Portal) would be like if it were written for WoW instead.

I never thought I’d ever do this video. The song is so perfectly suited for Portal and the “villain” in that game, GLaDOS, that I couldn’t see it ever fitting anywhere else. But then the idea hit me — who in WoW would sing a song gloating about being still alive? And the rest fell into place.

Or did it? When I posted this video, the YouTube comments were mostly positive, but there was a higher-than-usual percentage of comments saying I’d blown it. Mostly they seemed to hate the audio, with GLaDOS singing, and they wished I’d used the version of the song with Jonathan Coulton himself singing. Honestly, I’d never seriously considered the idea of using JoCo’s version for two reasons: firstly, my video is a reference to Portal and GLaDOS. JoCo’s version of the song is a reference to the original GLaDOS version of the song. If I used JoCo’s version, I’d be using a reference to something in my reference to something, and I thought it just wouldn’t work well. Secondly, I’m not a fan of JoCo’s version and I always liked GLaDOS’ version better. But the Internet has a different opinion, and I aim to please, to I made a different version.

Here is “Still Alive” with Jonathan Coulton singing instead of GLaDOS. As soon as I posted this, the Internet calmed back down. It’s a mystery to me, but the comments are now back to being nearly universally positive (which I prefer), and they loves them some JoCo version, which is fine with me.

There’s actually one more version of that song out on the Netterwebs, a duet that features both GLaDOS and JoCo singing together (two different versions here and here). I considered putting out a third version of the video using that audio, just to capture every possible combination of GLaDOS/JoCo fan that exists. But I’m too chicken. The Internets have calmed down now about the video and I don’t want to re-enrage the beast by putting out a new version that they can say makes even less sense than the GLaDOS version did because it’s not only a girl singing Arthas’ part, but it’s both a guy and a girl. And they’d be right. So I’m not gonna do it.

I got an email from a guy (or, “bloke”, as the case may be) who just made a video for a British charity called “Alcohol, It’s No Joke“. They’re using British comedians in a series of videos that start out funny before descending into darkness. He thought I might be interested in them because, as he says, “as someone who clearly knows a thing or two about ironic juxtaposition, you might enjoy taking a look”.

He’s right, I did like the videos. I like that they hook you in with something you like (comedy) and before you realize you’ve been flipped, they’ve already delivered their message to you, non-preachy ninja-style.

If you’d like to take a look too, you can check them out here, and here. They’ve also got a website and are on Twitter @alcoholnojoke, if you decide you really dig what they’re doing.

The folks over at Spintown interviewed me recently, and I think it may be the only actual video evidence that I exist out in the wild (apparently I’m quite elusive). Here’s Part one, and Part two of the interview, in which I talk about my videos and the experience of making them.

The interview was actually a series of questions that I answered while talking into the iSight camera on my wife’s MacBook. So I’m not actually interacting with anyone while I answer the questions (which is probably painfully obvious in the interview as I stare blindly at the laptop’s screen). But I really enjoyed the interview because the questions were so good. I’ve been interviewed before, and the questions are usually of the “so, where do you get your ideas?” or “what does Jonathan Coulton think of your work?” variety. But the Spintown questions were much better than that, allowing me to answer them in the form of telling little stories. It definitely made it interesting on my end, and hopefully you’ll find it interesting on your end too.

I have no idea how many people out there will care about this, but I’ve made Spiffworld t-shirts available on Zazzle.com. It was easy enough to do, since I actually used Zazzle to make the Spiffworld shirt I wore to my first Blizzcon, back in the day. So now, anyone else who wants to sport my site’s logo, can do it too. Merry Christmas!

Oh yeah, I posted a new video last week and forgot to mention it here. Oops. It’s for Jonathan Coulton’s song “Blue Sunny Day” about a depressed vampire (I know, a stretch for Jonathan Coulton).

Believe it or not, this video was really tough to make. Usually, JoCo songs are a little vague. We don’t know for sure what happens at the end of “Re: Your Brains”, or “Code Monkey”, or “The Future Soon”, which is great for me because then I get to fill in those blank spots with my own stuff in my videos. But “Blue Sunny Day” is unusually specific. We know what happens at the end, and pretty much all throughout the video. So there was little wiggle room for me to add my own gags and other stuff.

In fact, it’s completely normal for me to get through the first rough draft of a video and then have to go back to re-edit it to squeeze out the suckiness to make the final version as good as it can be. But the first draft of “Blue Sunny Day” had the most suckiness any of my first drafts have had, and it took quite a bit of editing to squeeze it all out of there (hopefully I got it all). There was just something about the song that made the timing of shots hard to get so it felt right. But I’m happy with the end result.

Even though I say the song is very specific, I’m also impressed by the level of ambiguity that Coulton baked into the song (a paradox, I know). Like I say in the ending scroll in the video, if you go back and listen to the words Coulton used, he never actually says the song is about a vampire. It could just be a normal guy who’s depressed by blue sunny days for some reason. But, he admits when asked, it’s totally a vampire.

As I just announced with a short little video, I’m joining the Machinima.com network. Hopefully this will bring many new eyeballs to my videos, which is a good thing. However, I’m still going to continue posting my vids to my normal YouTube channel, so if you don’t care about other people’s machinima, you can just keep doing what you’re doing (i.e. stay subscribed to my YouTube channel) and you’ll keep getting my videos as you always have. And that’s a good thing too. It’s a double-good thing!

My vids on Machinima.com: www.machinima.com/series/view&id=245

My vids on Machinima’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p= FCE740C094DDCEAF.

And in case you missed it in the announcement video, I’ll be posting a new vid this coming Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

I posted new video, sort of. It’s just a short little video telling people that they can follow me on Twitter (something you people already know). Sure, I didn’t really need to post a whole new video just to announce this, but it was more fun that way. In fact, I had more fun working on this 1:22 long video than I’ve been having working on the real video I’m supposed to be working on. And just to give you an indication of how much time these videos take, this video that’s not even two minutes long still took me all day to complete.

The music I used was a wonderful reimagining of Jonathan Coulton’s “Creepy Doll” by BorbaSpinotti. I’m hoping to use more of his stuff for announcement videos like this one in the future.

If I could go back and remake one of my older videos, “Creepy Doll” would probably be the one, and I’d make it more like this video is. The original “Creepy Doll” video was done before I’d learned most of the tricks I now know about how to craft a video, and I wish I’d been able to do more with it. Making this announcement video is most likely the closest I’ll ever get to another shot at “Creepy Doll”, and it was a lot of fun doing it.

I attended w00tstock last night with my daughter.  We weren’t sure she’d be able to go because she’d gotten the flu a couple of days before, but by the time show day rolled around, she’d beaten the fever and was in perfect health all day, which is good because she’s a huge Mythbusters fan and would have been extremely bummed out if she missed being able to meet Adam Savage (a w00tstock headliner).

Leading up to the show, my main question was “what the heck was w00tstock?” and “what would I be seeing if I went to w00tstock?”  It was being billed as a “celebration of geek culture”, which could be either really cool or really dorky, and still didn’t tell me much about what the show would actually consist of.  I can now report that w00tstock is sort of a geeky, funny variety show, with musical acts and humorous readings and presentations, where you find that you mysteriously understand every Star Wars reference and Pac Man joke that’s made the entire night.  It was a show pretty much aimed at me.

Paul & Storm provided the musical glue for the show, singing fun songs from their act which my daughter and I had seen from when they tour with Jonathan Coulton.  Wil Wheaton, famous from Star Trek: the Next Generation, was a co-headliner, and it turns out he’s very funny.  He had some funny video clips and read a passage from one of his books about a story from when he was eight years-old and got talked into trading his Death Star toy for a Landspeeder and five bucks (an abysmal trade, as every manchild in the audience immediately understood).  Kid Beyond, billed as a “human beatbox”, did some human beatbox-ey songs and had a short A/V presentation.  Molly Lewis played the ukelele (turns out she should have practiced a little more but the crowd loved her anyway ), and Adam Savage from Mythbusters gave a presentation about his 100 Wishes.  Turns out, quite a few of those wishes are things you’d think he’d have no problem with, like owning a pool table and having a secret passage in his house that you access through a bookshelf.  Some of them were a little tougher though, like wanting to have dinner with the actual Hellboy.

I had  offered to let them show any of my videos at the show, and they would have fit right in with that crowd, but it looks like they didn’t make the cut.  It’s too bad too, because I think my video for Paul & Storm’s “Live” would have been perfect to have played on the screen behind P&S while they sang the song.  As it was, Paul asked the crowd if anyone had seen my videos (the loud cheering indicated that many of them had) and he had me stand up and take a bow, which was great.  There was even one person who wanted my autograph on their w00tstock poster, which was an unexpected honor.

In an odd sign of the compactness of my social life, I recognized one person in the audience whom I’d worked with at Adobe (not directly, don’t know what department she’s in) and two guys who worked with me on Hotmail at Microsoft.  There was also one guy with long hair, a beard, and a puffy shirt that I swear I’ve seen before but can’t remember from where.

The entire evening boiled down to one thing at the end — my daughter was not going to leave there without obtaining Adam Savage’s autograph on a piece of duct tape we’d prepared for the occasion (we’d just watched the Mythbusters episode on duct tape the evening before).  Adam was happy to sign it, and when he found out that I was the guy who made the video for Jonathan Coulton’s “The Future Soon”, which Adam was such a huge fan of, Adam gave me a hearty handshake and congratulations for doing a great job.  So that was nice.

I signed up for Twitter. I’m @spiffworld. I’ve got nothing particularly interesting to say at the moment, but if I think of something, I’ll be sure to tweet about it. I figure at the very least, I’ll post when I’ve started working on a new video, with updates on progress and anything interesting that occurs to me about the process. Heck, I should have done this before Blizzcon so I could have talked about that. Anyhoo, follow me… if you dare.

I had a fabulous time at Blizzcon, which wasn’t a sure thing going into it since I was going alone and could very well spend the weekend sad and pathetic and lonely (like I did last year). However, this year I got to hang out with Chris Fromlett from the “Dude, Where’s My Mount” machinima videos (and his lovely girlfriend, Teresa), and it’s always better to have a buddy at an event like this.

I won 2nd place in the machinima video contest, which was a huge honor. My entry was a modified version of “Cruel, Cruel Moon“. The only difference between the contest version and the original version is that I took out the copyrighted (probably) “American Werewolf in London” pix, which made the video less funny, but more legal, and had the added benefit of allowing me to lean on a lame technicality to get the video into the contest — the contest rules say the videos need to be “unreleased”. Well, the version of “Cruel, Cruel Moon” that won 2nd place in the contest had never been released. Like I said, kind of lame, but legal.

Blizzard, of course, announced the new WoW expansion Cataclysm, and I got to play the new races in their starting areas. The worgen look hawt, and there’s no question that between them and the goblins, they’re definitely the cooler of the pair. However, I actually had more fun playing the goblins. The goblins start out shipwrecked on a jungle island, and there are quests to do things like stop the monkeys from stealing your gear by tossing them bananas, and using goblin weed-whackers to mow down the carnivorous plants. Fun stuff. The worgen starting zone, by contrast, is much darker, with a definite old-England style to it (lots of men wearing top hats) so that it feels like Jack the Ripper or Mr. Hyde could walk around the corner any minute. The undead are assaulting your town and you have to fight them off, which is a blast to do while you’re in worgen form (not sure why anyone would ever spend any time at all in human form since it’s much less cool and there’s no advantage to doing it), but it’s definitely much “heavier” than the goblin zone.

Ozzy Osbourne was amazing. We weren’t sure if he’d just shamble on stage and mumble a couple of songs or what, but that guy went all-in, leaving nothing in the locker room. It was the loudest, thrashing-est, most bad ass show I’ve seen in probably 15 years. There was apparently some fire safety gear on stage, because Ozzy picked up a fire hose at various points during the show and just sprayed the shit out of the first rows of people with fire retardant (which was awesome). And there were buckets of water that Ozzy dunked his head in and then splashed out into the audience.

When he came out for his encore, he started mumbling something completely unintelligible into the microphone that we totally couldn’t understand. Something about Japan maybe. But then a little Japanese kid, maybe ten-years-old, came out on stage wearing a guitar that was nearly as big as he was, and Ozzy started “Crazy Train”, which made everyone go nuts. But then we noticed that this little kid was shredding the lead guitar himself, which made everyone go even crazier. The kid was incredible, and Ozzy, decrepit old guy that he is, even hefted the kid up onto his shoulder a couple of times while the kid nailed the solos. It was an absolutely fabulous show.

The dance, sound-alike, and costume contests were fun this year, but they weren’t as good as previous years. There was a guy dressed up like a summoning stone, which was awesome.

I also managed to meet up with a fan — Aeonesti. That’s always so cool when someone enjoys my videos enough to want to go out of their way to say hi. Hi Aeonesti!

This year’s experience renewed my feelings for Blizzcon. Last year was pretty boring by myself, but this year, with the contest win and the Ozzy concert, and having a buddy to hang out with, made this a completely fun experience, and I’m glad I went.