Category: Personal

Categories
Personal

On Being The Very Best Like No One Ever Was.

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When I say I was into Pokémon, I mean I was into Pokémon. I was sucked in the first time I read about it in Nintendo Power. This isn’t specifically about the game, which is/was/will remain fantastic. This is about the trading card game.

I was already wrapped up in the world of Pokémon when I heard about it. I may or may not (totally did) have a Pokémon binder among various other paraphernalia. I’m not totally sure how I caught wind of it, but I heard a couple of my friends were in an after school Pokémon card league on Fridays. Well, I liked Fridays, I liked after school, and I sure as hell like Pokémon. I didn’t know a thing about trading card games, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I convinced/whined and complained to my parents to purchase me a starter deck and promptly signed up for the league.

League was held at the now defunct:
Big-League Baseball Card Supply
527 N. Sheridan St.
Crown Point, IN 46307
663-7537

Luckily, those guys mentored me in the game and the atmosphere was welcome and inviting. For one glorious half-year (10/30/99-04/09/2000) Friday’s meant one thing. League 3-7 PM. It also meant Totino’s party pizzas, but while league is a thing of the past, party pizzas can still, and should happen.

It hard to explain how fun it was, but it was something I greatly looked forward to at the end of each week. It was fiercely competitive, but everyone was surprisingly nice for a group of mostly boys aged 9-12. We just all loved the game and loved playing it.

We kept scores and reported all matches so we had point totals and checked the website religiously to see our rankings. Sadly, due to the card shop closing the website is also a thing of the past. Luckily, the wonderful Way Back Machine archived the site. I have now mirrored the sites, as they were when I saw them, on my own site.

Here are the links:

Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5

We were intense. The shop owner imported the yet to be released Japanese card packs and sold them to us for a hefty profit. I shutter to think how much money I sank into those cards. Because they were in Japanese we had translation guides found in the once great, SCRYE. We went so far as to have to have blacked out card back protectors when using the Japanese cards because the designs on the back of the Japanese cards were different from the American version and people could cheat if not blocked.

I became a “Gym Leader” in the 4th season of the league. This basically meant I could be a deciding voice in match disputes. I also was in charge of official scoring and mentoring. It was super fun!

We all developed strategies and analyzed weaknesses and spent hours building, tearing apart, and rebuilding decks. This culminated in a tournament held at Southlake Mall in Merrillville, IN.
It was an official Wizards of the Coast tournament, and this was the peak of Pokémania. It was massive with hundreds of kids and some teenagers playing. Because we played all the time against each other we were pretty confident in our abilities. One of my friends was like a savant. I almost never beat him. I managed to walk away with three victories, but lost early on. He made it to the final round. It was actually two Big League players who faced off for the championship. He ultimately lost, but it was clear we were the best players in the area. Which was brag worthy back then, but maybe (definitely) no so much now.

Like all good things that burn too brightly, it was done almost as soon as it started. When 2000 came around we were all started to become angsty teenagers who were more into girls than card games. That meant, sadly, Pokémon league was out the window. And so it went, but I can look back on it fondly as an amazingly fun was to spend a Friday night. I still have my decks, so maybe some Friday night the special, three move, Japanese, Team Rocket Mewtwo will make an appearance.

Categories
Personal Video

On Inspirations or Star Wars Fan Films.

Full disclosure, I have spent entirely too much time on these videos. It could be argued that this was a learning experience, and I did learn a lot, but I still poured time I could have been using to better benefit humanity in some way. Alas, ancient Star Wars fan films are what took my attention this go-round.

When I wrote the description of the uploads I said, “I have no strong connection beyond nostalgia to these films, but they are still enjoyable.” Which is what this originally was, a throw-away lark.

The film, PA Wars, is a goofy story about a PA (production assistant) for a video production company. PAs are generally the lowest on the totem pole and are the people fetching lattes and dry cleaning. Being fed up with his station he retaliates against the “emperor”. It’s filled with goofy humor, movie references, and cheesy one-liners. The perfect fan film.

Upon re-watching (and re-watching again thanks to a painful editing process – more on that later) it triggered why I loved it so much when I was a kid, and how it informed my later decisions with video.

The film does a great job capturing the zeitgeist of the late 90s. Any dork, and plenty non-dorks, had Star Wars on the tip of their tongues. A new one was being made! It had been so long since the last one made its indelible mark on pop culture. This was a big deal. I remember impatiently waiting on any information to come out about the movie. There were also countless product tie-ins everywhere. This included the iconic collector cups from Taco Bell and plastic light sabers – who didn’t own three of those (or five depending on if you were me in 1998)?

This smashed directly into the dot-com boom. The internet was totally happening. Guys, the future, it was here. This meant a lot of Star Wars fan sites were popping up (wanna join my web ring?).

I’d like to include another advent taking place at this time. Digital video. Not just DVDs, but the ability to edit your own personal videos on a computer. This was all without costly setups. Even tough the Video Toaster was available for your Commodore Amiga (yeah, I didn’t have one either) home video production was mainstream now. Yeah, people will give me crap, but I largely attribute this to Apple. They were all about the iMac being your “digital hub” and this included video. All you needed was a DV camera, Final Cut Pro or iMovie, and a dream. Before the days of YouTube they were one of the major standards for internet video – Quicktime .mov files with resolutions the size of a postage stamp.

What I’m saying is this all collided with a bevy of Star Wars fan films. People were desperate for new Star Wars so these fan films, including this one, filled a void while waiting for the new film.

I went searching for PA Wars a while back because it popped into my head, and all I could find was the second part of the film. I thought it was just lost in the history of the internet. Well, when I was going through some old VHS tapes to convert to digital I happened upon one that said “Star Wars Fan Films”. Evidently, I found these films so hilarious I recorded them off of my computer onto a VHS tape to show to friends. Those .mov files were too big to transfer on a floppy, so VHS was a natural next step. Here is a picture of the original capture.
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Yeah I didn’t even make it full screen, you can still see the Quicktime player. The important thing is, I had it still! Thanks, young Matt.

It was in pretty poor shape in terms of quality. Clearly, I needed to fix it to the best of my ability. First step was to de-interlaced it. I ended up finding a process outside of Premiere Pro because Premiere is not good at it from my experience. I used a program called VirtualDub. I took the de-interlaced footage, scaled, cropped, color and level corrected then encoded it for YouTube. I tried to mess with the audio only in Premiere and originally thought it was good enough. Then after uploading and encoding (which took hours even with GPU acceleration) it kept bugging me. It had a persistent hum and was really quiet despite me boosting the volume. From experience with Tim and Matt play I picked up some skills for cleaning up audio in Audacity. So, I extracted the audio and removed the noise, normalized, compressed, and then ran it though a low-pass filter because some of the quieter dialog had a loud, high-frequency pop to it. Added it back and re-encoded it and re-uploaded it.

I did a search one more time to see if the original PA wars files were online. I found the special edition ones on Daily Motion. So, I grabbed those, scaled them, put the two parts together and uploaded them to YouTube.

This should be self-evident, but I am a huge dork, and a little bit of a perfectionist.

So, here are the fruits of my labor. Posted for the world.

To end on a bit of a personal note. This film was one of the reasons I wanted to make videos. It seemed so fun (it is by the way). I even kind of stole a scene of there’s and put it in a movie I made in high school. The Stayin’ Alive walk intro. I did it in my Dracula movie for English class.

So, in closing, Matt had a past. This was part of it.

Categories
Music Personal

On A Favorite Episode.

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This topic is one of mine, actually. This one came to me because I had a song stuck in my head for roughly two weeks, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, peg it. It wasn’t until I heard it again while at the gym that I was able to take note of some of the lyrics and look it up online. (Thank goodness for the Internet!) The song was by Adult Diversion by Alvvays. Listen to it below!

This reminded me of an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Pete & Pete is a standout show in terms of the 90s Nickelodeon block. It was awesome. It was weird. It had Iggy Pop as a dad next door. There was little more you could ask for out of kid-oriented show. It is, above all that, the ultimate encapsulation of pre-adult life in suburbia. I can gush on and on about it, but I’ll try to keep my gushing focused to the topic.

Hard Day’s Pete, the finale of season one, focuses on Little Pete’s adventure (eh, eh) to rediscover his favorite song. The episode starts out with Little Pete in his garage broadcasting from his homemade pirate radio show. From the voice over from his older brother we learn that Little Pete isn’t too fond of music. He doesn’t really get why people keep calling in to request their favorite songs. It’s not until fate nudges him down a shortcut to not be late to school does he discover what all the hub-ub is about. Serendipitously, a grungy band is having a jam session (in the morning for some reason because Pete is going to school) in a garage. Little Pete hears the song and has to stop to listen. He is struck by the rock gods of rock. The song attaches itself to Little Pete. Now he get’s it. Little Pete has a favorite song.

One problem quickly arises. It was just a happenstance that he heard the song. When he goes searching he can’t find the song anywhere. The band disapperated. The house is unoccupied. No CD or album has the song. No radio station is playing it. For all intents and purposes the song never existed. The one place it does still live, though, is inside Little Pete. So, like any reasonable person would do, he makes it his mission to reproduce the song, his song. He had is parents buy him a guitar and he starts a-strummin’.

He plucks and picks day and night and just as he is about to give up, BAM, he nails the riff. He forms a band, comprised of a ten year old with mutton chops on drums, his math teach on bass, and the meter reader on rhythm guitar, and of course, old “Thunderball” Pete on lead, like you do; a motley crew if there ever were one. They play that riff for two days without any progress.

You know what playing for two days straight does; it drives up the electric bill. Pete’s dad can’t afford that! Geeze! He let’s his son know that if he can’t raise $700 then he is going to have to pull the plug, quite literally. Just as hope is receding into the night, big bro Pete comes to the rescue. If he can play Marmalade Cream, he will toss him $5. Then the phone keeps ringing off the hook with requests. Impromptu telethon! A quick montage later and they are at $700, but Pete is no closer to remembering his favorite song. He can’t take it and walks off with his guitar and amp in hand. He heads off to the garage where he heard the elusive tune. His band comes in tow minutes later and gives him the encouragement he so sorely needs. He gives it one final go and stands in the spot where he first heard the song. Magically, it starts to come back. In come the flashbacks to the band playing. He’s got it! He remembered! And with that he and his band recreate the lost song, never to be lost again. That song, by the by, is Summerbaby by Polaris, who made the soundtrack for the show. Listen below!

It sounds incredibly cheesy, and that’s because it’s incredibly cheesy. That’s not really a knock against it, just calling a duck a duck. I think the reason this episode was so memorable is because it is so relatable, maybe not one-to-one, but in terms of nostalgia. I think most of us get waves of nostalgia at times. Sometimes that can be painful, but other times it can be great. A song comes on (LIKE IN THE EPISODE!), a smell wafts in, and suddenly you are right back there. It reminds us of who we were, for better or for worse, and this can be fantastic, as long as we are not living there. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and, like any drug, has a proper dosage.

This is going to be a break in the flow of this because I can’t seem to make any progress. I’ve erased and re-written this paragraph about five times. It feels like I’m trying to make a point, but I never really intended to with this post. I have a strong pull toward nostalgia, and music is a pretty powerful conductor of it for me. I have gone on crazy quests, like Pete, to try to recapture some of the past. One need not look much farther than my previous video game collection. Which I recently sold, because time stops for no man! Also, cash is decent for moving. The rambling takeaway is that the episode resonates for me, and I love Pete & Pete.

I need to end this because I will inevitably write another six paragraphs about pseudo-psychological theories about nostalgia and no one wants that.