So I don't listen to the Radio much. It's been a while since I've stopped to see whats new and whats big out there right now. I have a tendency to trade music with my friends and search for things on myspace. Like if i find an artist, and they feature another artist on their page, I'll pick up the link and give them a listen.

So I decided to back and listen to the radio today. Its....A bit of a different worlds out there.

I listen to a lot of different music, with number one artist in my books being guys like Aesop Rock, MC Frontalot, Say Hi, Frank Musik, The Octopus Project, Plushgun, Radio Head, MSI, The Flamming Lips, Daft Punk, Flobots, The Gorillaz, odd kinda indyish stuff like that. Not to say that I don't like main stream music. I love AC/DC, Notorious BIG, The Killers, The Beatles, The Beastie Boys, Cake, Common, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Linkin Park, Metalica, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Outkast, Queens of the Stone Age, Red hot Chilli peppers. But when it comes to top 40, well. Thats a different subject.

I went out and listened to a couple of "top 40 songs", like: "I Kissed a girl", "Lollipop", "Take a bow", and "Love Song", and I started to think...Is this what we are?

I've always been curious as if the top 40 of every chart is a representation of the era. Lets say we took the top 40 songs of every year from 2000 to 2010, the top 10 most watched TV shows, the 15 top video games from 2000 to 2010, the 30 top movies from 2000 to 2010, and the 10 best selling books of the same decade, and compared them, would we have a compiled collection of the thoughts, emotions, wants/needs and ideals of this generation? Can we be categorized or statistically represented by major media? Do we also need to get the biggest youtube videos, or most hit websites, or best sold products? Its just an odd things thats been on my mind. Not that the results we get would be terrible, I just think that it would end up being a mis representation. Is there any way to cement you section of the world, or how you lived, or capture what was around you and deliver it to the future? Yes, theres time capsules and blogs and newspapers and the like, but what will be said about this decade 40 years from now, when we look back at it and laugh like we do with the 50s.

Just a curious question. Thoughts?

Posted by Rafael Diaz at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I have a lot of stories to tell, and very little time to tell them, but I'll post (For now) a reader's digest version of the stories.

I've got a couple of photos of us working on our game for IGF, called "The Ballad of Dan Hart". Heres one of Auston and Dan P. Working:

Here's Bryan and Alex G. talking about some programming details:

And then there's Jaimie and Alex:

We're trying to put together and independent game festival submission, so that we can go to the "Game Developers Conference" in late February. If you're interested in game design, you should check out some IGF games:
http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html

I've been working on an EMC project as well. I'm currently the creative director for a game I came up with the concept for. Its pretty awesome being 20 and getting paid to make a game you came up with. I've got a ton of good people on my team. We work in the game lab, and while we work hard, we also know how to have a good time.

Thats what work is like. I'll come back later this week to talk about what we do for fun.

Posted by Rafael Diaz at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)