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About this blog

Mostly Atari-related projects, and other ramblings. Home of the Artie the Atari comic strip.

Entries in this blog

19th Nervous Breakdown

So, for the 19th year now (not in a row... but that's another story) I've put together the end-of-year shows for the CalArts Character Animation Program. Last year's blog blurb about this can be found here. And if you poke around enough, you'll find blog entries for these going back to 2008 (with a brief mention in 2006). Maybe it's a form of therapy or something. In a weird sort-of way, I kind of wish I'd been blogging about this since the first one I did. A lot of lost memories along the way.

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Incoming! part 2

When we last left my Incoming! contest entry, I decided it needed a little something extra - an explosion!   The original artwork had the tank dropping into the scene, and bouncing off the sand dune. Since the tank was already in the air, and pieces were falling off of it, it lent itself very well to having an explosion underneath it, without having to do much additional work.   Painting an explosion is something it took me awhile to figure out. Once in awhile I'd manage to put one together

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Will the WRC return to competitiveness?

Admittedly, I've hardly been paying any attention to the World Rally Championship (WRC) for the past two years. For starters, there hasn't been any U.S. TV coverage. No surprise there - we don't even get Rally America Championship races. All we get are GRC highlights, which is hardly rallying. Velocity does carry ERC highlights - at 5:00 AM Sunday mornings - but they don't start running them until the season is almost over. But at least it's something, and it's a lot more competitive than the W

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Roll over! Sit! Speak!

So here's the dillyo (word up)...   Since several of you regular readers (yes, you) just so happen to be 2600 programmers (who, I might add, are some of the most talented, creative, and staggeringly intelligent people on the face of the planet), I thought I'd ask for some programming help. And I figured it would be more appropriate to do it here, than clutter up the homebrew forums.   Now, by "help" I actually mean "do (most of) the programming for me". But I figured you already saw that com

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Get a CLU

Tron: Uprising debuts in June on Disney XD. Looks stylish!   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ds_ukdV7Kw   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K17aH76uNv8   Not quite sure about the lead character, Beck, though...   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPfmNxKLDG4

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

W(ogie)RC

And so… another year brings another season of the World Rally Championship.   Uh… is anyone watching this anymore?   Anyone?   It's been just one guy named Sebastien winning everything after another. First Loeb, now Ogier. Particularly impressive last year though was how dominant Ogier was in a brand new car, on a brand new team. Not just new to him, but VW was an all-new team, period. Admittedly, he had about a year of development time in the car beforehand, but that wasn't in competition

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Another Pleasant Valley To-do List

So... it's been another two years since the last list. Stuff has been happening, I just haven't posted updates in awhile. So I thought this would be a good time to reboot the list again. Clean out the old stuff. Donate unused items to Goodwill. That sort of thing. Latest updates are in red. Homebrews in development: Zeviouz (was "Starts with a 'Z'")* Game graphics: In progress. Development status: Active development. 5-9-20: New homebrew project. 5-23-20: First

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

So... many... Daves...

First things first - Happy New Year!   Yeah, okay, I'm a little late with that.   I've been on vacation for a few weeks, after having wrapped up the projects mentioned in my last entry. The games seem to be reaching the hands of their owners at last (I don't envy the task Albert had in putting all of the orders together), and I hope everyone enjoys them! Being involved with various aspects of some of these games (sprites and other artwork) I generally play them quite a lot before they hit th

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Will Tron: Legacy tank at the box office?

"Tank"... get it?     Tron: Legacy is a huge unknown, and a big risk for Disney. The original film, while widely 'recognized' as innovative, was hardly boffo box office. However, the arcade game was a huge success, and a dedicated group of hard-core Tron nerds have kept the digital flame alive for nearly 30 years. So Disney obviously must see some potential here, or they wouldn't take the risk, right?   Well, Disney has also produced its fair share of box office bombs over the years. Th

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Cheer up, sleepy Jean...

Davy Jones passed away at 66 today.   I'll admit it - I'm a Monkees fan. As a kid, I grew up watching syndicated reruns of the show in the mid-70's. It was silly, irreverent, had fun music, broke the fourth wall, and was an enjoyable guilty pleasure, just like other favorites of my youth - Batman and Gilligan's Island. Silliness for silliness' sake.   The music was a huge part of the show, although I didn't think of it as anything but part of the show at the time. I had a little tape recorde

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

The Turbo that never was

Time for another... Stupid Game Idea! (idea... idea... idea... cookie... idea...)   Turbo was one of my favorite arcade games, and was the best arcade racer until Pole Position came along. Even then, it was still a groundbreaking game that would pave the way for others like Out Run, Cruisi'n USA, Chase H.Q., and all of their various sequels and spin-offs.   Sometime back I wrote up a little blurb on my involvement with the 2600 Turbo prototype. Initially, I was brought in to create artwork f

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

iBlog 4

I really, really like my iPad Mini. In the year since I bought it, I've used it far more than I ever expected to. So much so, that my iPhone's use dropped way off. I almost never play games on my iPhone anymore (unless it's the only iDevice with me), and only surf the 'net with it if I don't have Wi-Fi access (or again, if the iPhone's all I have with me). Although the iPhone is a lot easier to hide under the table during meetings. Plus, the iPhone is still my main music player, especially at wo

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Brave (spoiler-free review)

Currently, it's 11:41 PM, and I'm sitting in a movie theater, waiting for the first showing of Brave. Now, I'm not usually enough of a movie nut to go on opening night (or in this case - opening morning since the movie starts at 12:05 AM), but 1) I was bored and 2) I've learned not to go see Pixar films during the day, because parents tend to take their kids to those showings. I'm talking kids in strollers. Crying. Not how I want to spend my movie going hours.   Usually this late, there are ve

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Tron: Legacy Soundtrack

I picked up the Tron: Legacy Soundtrack by Daft Punk, and have been giving it a few listens.   It's not bad, although it's far more effective in context during the movie. Most of the soundtrack consists of low, long, rumbling chords driven along by plodding electronic rhythms. Not that that's all that bad... it does set an appropriate mood for the electronic world in the film, and the orchestrations help to add variety and intensity, but overall it just doesn't make for a great album to listen

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

More Tron fun

The viral marketing campaign for Tron Legacy rolls on! Someone at Disney is having a lot of fun with this.   In case you missed the new trailer... you can check it out at Apple's Trailer site or or the viral site.  It hits a lot of the right notes. Seeing Bruce Boxleitner back as Alan Bradley, a visit to the dilapidated Flynn's Arcade (which I've been to - it's in Culver City, although I think it was an Italian restaurant at the time), the touch-surface computer console (how far ahead of

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

New old music - part 4

Herb Alpert and Lani Hall released their second jazz album a few weeks ago, entitled "I Feel You".     Their first ("Anything Goes") was an excellent collection of mostly older standards, recorded live at a number of venues with a small and very talented combo.   "I Feel You" is a mix of some older and some more contemporary standards, again recorded with the same group of musicians, but this time in the studio. While this results in perhaps a more polished album, it loses some of the spo

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Gravity - Spoiler-free review

From the trailers, Gravity looked sort-of interesting. In the way that Moon looked sort-of interesting. I went and saw Moon, and really liked it.   A lot of people have been seeing Gravity, and according to Rotten Tomatoes anyway, they've really liked it.   So I ponied up twenty bucks, and saw it in IMAX 3D. I figured that way I'd get the best experience out of it.   Am I missing something?   Okay... the movie looks amazing. Really amazing. The 3D works as well as I've ever seen in a fea

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

China, or platinum

Depending on which list you go by, 20 years is either symbolized by gifts of china or platinum.   China, as in plates and stuff. Not necessarily things made in China. Although I'm sure you could easily enough find china made in China, thereby removing any sort of potential confusion.   Except for the whole platinum thing, which doesn't really make sense since it's actually more valuable than silver or gold, so shouldn't it be up higher? Like 75 or something?   Anyway… 20 years. That's how

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

If it's Saturday, it must be October

Okay, so I'm blogging. Just like the rest of the internet. Always more than a few months behind the curve, it seems, even though I was online with AOL, usenet, and even doing the whole "chat" thing (irc) back in '94. But I was one of the brilliant people who never thought the World Wide Web (remember when people still called it that?) would catch on. It seemed like a handful of disjointed sites with questionable content and no coherent way of finding anything. Now of course, it's millions of dis

Guest

Guest

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Spoiler-free movie review

Let's start at the beginning. When I first saw Star Wars in 1977, it was at the UA 150 theater in downtown Seattle. I was too young to drive, so my parents had to take me down there, a 20 mile round trip, to see the movie. Somehow, over the course of the next year or so, I managed to convince them to do that another 10 or 11 times as I saw the movie again and again. It's pretty astonishing now to think of any movie sticking around in first-run theaters for over a year, but Star Wars did it. Th

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Homebrew Art, part 7 - Go Fish! contest entries

Go Fish! (2005) This was the sixth label contest I'd entered, and with it my three-contest winning streak came to an end. But it was a good run while it lasted. Go Fish! is Bob Montgomery's take on games similar to Intellivision's Shark! Shark! I started with sketches in Painter. Each element was drawn on a separate layer so I could move them around as needed. Note in the first sketch there's a giant shark head looming in the background. I'd eventually move this into my second contest entry

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

Tales from... THE FUTURE! (revisited)

So, it's January. Funny, it seems like it was January just a few weeks ago.   The MacWorld Expo (Apple's big annual show-and-tell) is coming up in a couple of days. They almost always announce some new product at it. The question is - what will they release this year? (That would be 2008, by the way. I don't know about you, but I find that rather hard to believe.)   With that, I'll once again display my incredible wealth of ignorance, by making Technology Predictions for 2008. But first, it'

Nathan Strum

Nathan Strum

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