Have I mentioned that I’m in a band?

Well I am … and I have more news regarding said organization! We’ve officially secured a weekend at Max Trax Studios in Albany, NY to record our demo. HOTNESS!

We’re heading up the weekend of August 13-15th (you know just days before our first gig). Adrien (bass) and Matt (singer) have that Friday off so they will drive up together in Adrien’s Bronxmobile with all of our equipment and set up for a couple of hours before working stiffs John (drums) and I (NBA Sim) follow by train/bus. The plan is to stay with Adrien’s brother who lives up there and record for a total of 16 hours over the next two days. I’m hoping to bring up a camera to capture some impromptu, romantic moments whilst recording and hanging out to share with everyone while you patiently wait for the music, itself.

Three nights recording, one day off and then our first gig … damn, this should be cool! I’m really excited to get the band up and running – ready or not, in those five days come mid-August, Rusted Hero will be born.

Current Mood: Primed!

Alright, so you’ve listened to the practice recordings over at RustedHero.com, become a friend of the Rusted Hero Facebook and MySpace pages, and are an avid follower of the Rusted Hero Twitter account. But what about seeing these guys live?

Well, your wish (and ours) has come true!

Our first gig has officially been confirmed. We will be playing Tuesday, August 17th at Otto’s Shrunken Head on E 14th St and Ave B at 11pm! HOTNESS! I originally heard of the place when my New Jersey roommates’ metal band played there a couple years ago (I showed up just in time to not see them, though) and my coworker’s jazz band performed there as well. I’ve also just hung out in the place a couple of times on my own – it’s a wacky, weird bar with a great vibe. Hell, they played “Temporary Secretary” the last time I was in there – that’s gotta count for something!

Anyway, everyone, there’s no cover so I’m sure that’ll offset the fact that it’s a little late on a weekday. Who the hell cares, though, with a chance to be a part of history!

Current Mood: Excited

This past 4th of July festivities brought the much anticipated (and much needed) 3-day weekend. It almost made watching the boring fireworks spectacle bearable. Ok, I’m kidding. I only had to watch 5 minutes of it on my roof and then moseyed back down to my apartment. Definitely the way to go.

Anyway, I was really looking forward to the three day weekend because I had a shit of work to do. You know, video games, NBA Sim, music, Netflix: important stuff. Unfortunately, I had a mini scare! I had just settled down Saturday afternoon to put in a little time with my new copy of Ninja Gaiden Sigma (infamous for being one of the hardest games programmed in the past decade) when my PS3 just shut off! Instead of watching my ninja character stealthily decapitate foes, I was suddenly staring at a “cable disconnected” error on my tv.

After some research online I discovered it was, indeed, the dreaded YLoD (yellow light of death) ! I’m guessing that it was an overheating problem as the last couple months the machine was running really loudly … good thing I didn’t think to do anything about that! Plus, it was on the ground and Tito’s fur was probably clogging up vents. I was beside myself – what would I now do with multiple days free and no video games to play?!

My options seemed terrible. Basically, I would have to pay $150 if I was going to attempt to get my broken console fixed by Sony and it would take about a month to get it back. There was no way I was going to wait that long! I could try getting it fixed at a third party location, but that would require a ton of research plus a wait and cost that were comparable to getting it fixed by Sony. Then, I figured, if I could find an awesome deal on a new PS3 … one at a hair more money than the $150 fix fee, than it seemed like a good buy.

So I started scrambling. Within hours of the dead machine I had e-commerce sites up, eBay and Amazon a-runnin’, and began to scour craigslist for a replacement. An hour later I had my man: a guy right on the Upper East Side was selling off his brand new PS3 and 2 games (Resident Evil 5 and Army of Two) for $300. I told him I’d pay for the PS3 but wasn’t interested the game and offered $275 to take everything off his hands. The fool fell for it!

We made the exchange at a Starbucks in-between us and now I’m the proud papa of a spankin’ new PS3 120GB slim! This baby runs cooler, is smaller in size and larger in capacity than my old beast. Plus, I’m going to sell one of the games that I have no intention of playing for 100% pure profit! And the other game, which is on my vast list of games to play, I essentially bought for $12.50! The guy obviously didn’t care about his PS3 as he left all the online games, music, and movies that he purchased with his online account still on the machine so I am also the proud owner of a lot of bad rap and action movies!

Huzzah!

Current Mood: Awesome

I was the first of my programmer group to receive a new laptop. These new computers will be replacing the laptops we all were given in 2007 as they’re beginning to break down. Hell, I needed to have an external fan on mine 24-7 so it wouldn’t shut off! As welcome as this replacement is, I was a little nervous going in as … the new laptop is a MacBook Pro. Oh, and I haven’t used an Apple machine since 1999!

Anyway, it’s been almost 2 weeks with the laptop and I’m pretty much used to it. Although I do have a virtual machine running Windows XP on the laptop, I mostly use mac software. However, to tell you the truth, even though this machine is super nice, fast, pretty, and displays gorgeous visuals … I still wish I had a PC! Sorry, Apple, even after giving you the ol’ college try I’m still a PC guy.

That said, I am a little excited about a few new Apple products in my future (and present)! First off, I upgraded my iPhanus to the new OS 4 and … ’tis hot! The big hype is all about multitasking but so far I’ve been digging the app folder and wallpaper functionality the most.

Finally, as a combination of the new laptop and iPhone, I’m starting to get psyched about dipping my toe into the app building pool. I have dreams of one day creating the ultimate iPhone necessity – the NBA-Sim app! If I make any progress in this field I’ll let you all know.

Ok, actually that wasn’t really “finally” as I’d like to mention: wow, what a fucking game! Go USA! I suddenly care about a game where people used to kick decapitated heads around!

Current Mood: Patriotic

© 2010 Adrien Goulet

What a difference a day can make … 7:30am Monday morning I was asleep with no band name and wondering if we would ever come to a consensus on one after our voting debacle from last week. By 7:30am Tuesday we had a name, a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a MySpace page. By this morning we now have 3 songs up recorded from Monday’s rehearsal.

Hot!

I’m a bit of a foot-dragger and perfectionist when it comes to music – I admit this – so I’m still coming to grips with all of this web presence and available music even though we only have 4 practices as a four piece (and that’s including the bassist’s audition and catching him up on all the songs). Still, I’m super stoked and equally happy to have a progressive presence in the band, now. I get the distinct impression my social media activity, and just web activity in general, is going to skyrocket exponentially pretty soon as a result of all this musicness.

Get ready …

Current Mood: Rocking Out

© 2010 Stan Syckes

Another season of Zog basketball has come and gone so I thought I’d update everyone on my progress. You know, because this subject interests everyone.

I’m going to set this post up exactly like the one I made about my previous season, so first up is a quick rundown of the players:

• Rory – With the absence of CJ, the MVP of last year’s team, there was going to be a huge scoring hole. Luckily, Rory filled that gap. He had played basketball in high school and brought a super-hustle style mixed with great outside shooting. He was unquestionably the best player we had on the team and totally saved us in a couple of games. A really nice, funny, down-to-earth guy as well.
• Kathy – Kathy returned from her stint as our closer last season. Her shot wasn’t as dead on this season and she seemed to have lost a step but she toughed out every game and sopped up the most minutes out of all of us. Luckily, in our last games she showed a level of athleticism I never saw in her before – grabbing several big rebounds and blocking out tougher, male opponents. Hopefully an excellent sign if she decides to return.
• Jonathan – Once again the heart of the team, Jonathan seemed to take a step back and be more of a vocal presence this season. He still had a tenacious attitude on defense, more than making up for what he lacked in athleticism and speed. And no matter what he said to the contrary he also brought a decent shot.
• Dominique – I thought we would need another woman on our team to give Kathy a rest every now and then so I asked Zog to give us someone from the waiting list. We got Dominique who was a tall, tough girl who had great inside moves and was a hell of a rebounder. She only showed up to about half the games due to work scheduling, but when she showed up we always won.
• Me – I actually took a step forward this season. I was disciplined on defense as usual, but I focused more on driving over shooting. Sure, more than half of my drives usually ended up with me being stopped by a defender, but it opened up my teammates and made our offense a little less predictable. I’m really looking forward to working on that part of my game in the future.
• Alyson – A super basketball player although she was the smallest on the team, Alyson spread herself a little too thin. Besides our games, she was also in two other basketball leagues and ended up hurting her foot, ending her season after just 1 game with us. It was a little depressing as I thought we would have done a lot better with her on the court with us.

In typical Zog fashion it was a quick turnaround for the playoffs. Our first round matchup was against the 4th seed, Half-Dozen Donuts, who we had just finished playing against 2 DAYS BEFORE! I felt pretty comfortable coming back into the squad from my week off and playing against a team we had gone 1-1 against, but we got our asses handed to us. We all played well, though it was just Rory, Kathy, Jonathan and I (the usual suspects). Ah well. This season was less of a headache than last with no CJ, and each game felt more “ours” as we had to earn everything instead of sitting around watching him make a play. It was a lot of fun (as Zog ball always is), but I decided to take the summer season off and dedicate that time to getting back into better shape and focusing on music.

But come fall, NBA will be back on and the basketball bug will be biting. Watch out!

Current Mood: Accomplished

A bunch of interesting events have been happening in my life recently (and by interesting I mean painfully dull), so I’m going to try to do a series of quick, small blogs to catch everyone up to date on everything.

First off – a band cliffhanger!

We tried upping our band rehearsals to twice a week but it was starting to prove kind of difficult for whatever reason. So, to counter our natural laziness, we’ve upped the length of each rehearsal. Monday we met for our first 3-hour long practice. It was awesome because the pace was leisurely enough so we didn’t feel rushed and it also gave us enough time to hit up our secondary goal for the night: naming the band!

We really have been going for too long without a name – it’s usually the first thing people ask you when you’re in a band – and it might even be holding us back, even if just from a psychological standpoint. Adrien, our new bassist, came up with the following naming process:

1. Each member would come up with 3 band names for a total of 12
2. Each member would have an instant veto, bringing the total down to 8
3. Each member could vote on as many names from these 8 as he wanted
4. If there was a consensus winner it would become the name
5. Otherwise we would take the top two and do a head to head vote off

We all showed up to practice with our 3 names and began the crazy, Survivor-type method. But, to make things more interesting, we’d do just one step in the process, play a song, do another step, play another song, etc. At the end, there was one name with 3 votes and 3 other names with 2 votes so we moved all 4 onto another round. We were only allowed 1 vote each and whittled down this to 2 names – however the band was split! Two of us liked one name, the other two liked the other. So the final round we decided to have a debate-off with each person getting 5 minutes to say why they thought the name was better.

Even though I’ve always kinda wanted the other guys to come up with a name for the band, the ones I suggested did pretty well for the night with two of my three reaching the final four, and one of mine being the ultimate winner. We selected “Wasted Days” and all loved it. We played out through our set and went home for the night, satisfied that a huge obstacle had finally been conquered in a team effort.

… That is until we woke up the next morning and hated “Wasted Days.” Oh, well, I was foolish to think it would be this easy. When we finally do come up with a name I’ll let you all know here first.

Current Mood: Wowed Eh

LATE BREAKING NEWS (had this been a week ago): We’ve got a bassist!

After a long, fruitless search for a low-end player, the three mainstay members of my still unnamed band had decided to move on without one. We began to look at recording studios to pump out an EP and also started looking into playing live. We figured with those two items under our belt, we’d come across a bass player the old fashioned way.

Well, just like golf and free throws, when we finally stopped trying to control the bass-finding process we finally lucked into one. I randomly came across an ad on craigslist that sounded good. This was random because most of the ads marked as “bass” on this infernal site are other bands LOOKING for a bass! And those few and far between actual bassist posters are usually of the above-50/for-hire type.

When Adrien sent back a reply stating he liked our music and wanted to jam he also mentioned he was into video games and was a web designer. That situation sounded too good to be true, but John also gave me his usually dead on psychic premonition: “I have a good feeling about this guy.” We all met up for an audition jam two weeks ago. Adrien was confident on his instrument but not flashy which was great. Even better, the songs sounded like they were being played by a real band and not just three dudes! When he left John immediately said “I’m a yes.” Matt concurred. I, of course, was already taken by the video game comment in the email!

Anyway, last Monday we had a second jam and officially offered him a role in the band afterward. Adrien accepted and now, as my evil high school band director would say, we’re really cooking with gas!!! Hopefully some exciting things will be coming soon to a [stanus.net] near you!

Also, on a programming note, I’ve finally finished the last part of the Best/Worst of 2009 feature and am pretty much up to date with The Shack 10th Anniversary piece. That’s what 3-day Memorial Day weekends are for, peeps!

Current Mood: Excited

© 2010 ABC Studios

Warning: I’ll try to steer clear of spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the final episode you may want to wait to read this blistering [stanus.butt] review.

In case you weren’t already aware, I’m a Lost lover, so naturally last night’s final episode was kind of a big deal. Unlike the last, huge tv-ending event (Sopranos), I was emotionally invested in all the characters from Oceanic flight 815.

To celebrate the grand closing, Cassie scored some tickets to a meetup Lost group that was having a huge party in Brooklyn. One of the members had actually secured a famous “lost” Brooklyn subway station as the venue and we would all enter it in a hatch-like way (via a manhole in the street). It sounded really interesting and cool so I was a bit stoked.

We took the hour-long ride from our place to downtown Brooklyn and managed to find our way to the designated intersection but we didn’t see anyone who looked like a Lost fan. Worse, we didn’t notice any manhole-lifting equipment around, either. Well, to be honest, we had arrived just 2 minutes before the time said we were supposed to get there so we thought maybe they started early. But then … why would the equipment be gone? It all seemed fishy.

Cassie called the number on the tickets but the person answering stated they had no involvement with the event. Ok, weird. Now we thought we had fallen for a scam, so we took the ride back home. Quick side note as Cassie later discovered the event had been cancelled as of Monday and she had somehow missed this small, insignificant detail.

So we watched the final episode on our hot tv – half an hour into it to burn the ridiculous amount of commercials – and it was just as cool as some silly, Brooklyn subway viewing. Far more appropriate, anyway, as we had started this series watching on my laptop alone in my New Jersey bedroom. Even though Lost was a super-popular show I never really watched it in a party setting – it was best served isolated and in the dark much like the survivor’s setting.

Regarding the actual show, itself, I was pretty much pleased with everything. Sure, it was a bit too melodramatic in the relationship department for me – as final episodes all seem to be – but I enjoyed the fact that they didn’t attempt to answer all the questions. Why should the final episode be any different than the others? I was always kind of let down by the big reveals throughout the run of the show and enjoyed all the cliffhangers so much more, anyway.

Even though I’m very non-religious, I didn’t mind the Christian overtones to the whole closing. Just because I’m not into it doesn’t mean some artist can’t believe it or put it in his or her work. Whatever, it was interesting even if it was silly. A belief in an afterlife certainly wasn’t sillier than polar bears on a jungle island and smoke monsters!

I’ll wrap it up here even though I haven’t said a whole lot. Basically, it wasn’t as different or disappointing as the Seinfeld episode, nor was it as pretentious as the Sopranos. I’m trying to think of a better series ending actually … maybe Quantum Leap? I haven’t had a show be as big in my life as Lost in a long time, which is saying something, so it’s a little bittersweet to see it go.

But, fuck, now I have a lot more video gaming time! Thank you, Oceanic Six !

Current Mood: Applause

© 2010 Stan Syckes

From the overwhelming email I received* I know how hard this past month has been to all of you. When NBA Sim went down, it seemed like the world got a little less fun and a little more confused. I don’t know how everyone managed to survive in a world slightly less informed about basketball statistics but we made it.

NBA Sim is back!

What’s great is now it’s on the same, fantastic host as [stanus.butt] where I have unlimited space, bandwidth and SQL databases! That’s right, no more crashes, downtimes, and laggy loads. Nothing will stop you from hearing my much-needed basketball opinions.

Actual, interesting, non-NBA stuff coming up in the next blog post.

* Claim may or may not be true

Current Mood: Ecstatic