Benton Paul and Other Indie Goodness

Today's entry is about a friend of mine named Benton Paul. These days he's trying to make it as an indie singer. He's got a good voice and he's got a knack for both the guitar and the piano. He's got an album on iTunes, and if anyone who reads here is feeling particularly generous they can go and buy it. If you just want to hear a bunch of his music for free, you can do that too, or you can visit his own website.

Most of his music is about girls, as seen from the perspective of a single guy in the Utah dating scene. If this strikes you as relevant, you'll probably relate to a bunch of his songs. For the record, my favorite song is "Here's to the Boys."

So, off on my tangent: One of the things that's kind of cool about the Internet is its potential to act as a medium for creating popular culture. As little as twenty years ago, there were gatekeepers for public taste--if you wanted any kind of publicity outside of your hometown, you needed a soul-sucking contract with one of the media gatekeepers. Nowadays, all you need to do is, say, make a fool of yourself and post it online, and very occasionally you'll achieve nigh-celebrity status.

It seems that we are gradually achieving an alternative to content aggregation using social networks, but I don't really have any special insight into that, so I won't bore you. In the meantime, everyone go check out Jonathan Coulton and wonder if it'll all work out.

Indie Game Night

Every three months, at a little-known game studio in the basement of a chiropractor's office across the road from a 1960's era hamburger joint, something magical happens. Specifically, about two-dozen people all squeeze into the offices and show off the games they're developing. But these are not just any games; these are independent games. That is to say, they are games made on no budget, by guys who generally have day-jobs, and who are doing it because. . . well, I'm not sure any of us know why. Most of these games will never make any money. Frankly, most of these games will probably never be finished. They will never acquire more than a few hundred players. To describe it as a "niche market" is in fact inaccurate, because of the word "market."

The picture is from the gathering. This is a 3-year-old boy who has just discovered an arcade game from the 1980's stowed away in the break room. He's standing on two boxes of soda pop to reach the controls. If you thought that 3-year-olds couldn't be absorbed by something for more than five minutes at a time, then this would have been an education; he played a single game for well over an hour straight. This is his second arcade of the evening; about five minutes after this shot was taken, he was physically pried away and dragged home so that he would get some sleep. And yes, this gives me nostalgic flashbacks.

I was showing a game this time. It still has practically no art at all, so it's not really worth putting up a screenshot, but it was fun to play. The essence was that you run around inside a maze filled with huge swarms of flying creatures. You need to destroy the hives which are giving birth to the creatures, and as you do so, you get stronger. The hives also get stronger, though, and the level ends up as huge clouds of fireballs battling to hold at bay the ever-infringing hordes. I don't know that it was the most-loved game of the evening, but I spend too much time playing it already.

The remainder of the party largely consisted of soda pop, cookies, potato chips and pizza. There was also a lone fruit platter, looking decidedly out-of-place nestled among the greasy carbohydrates. In short, it was a fun evening, and I'll probably be showing up at the next one -- in July.

Lack of Updates and New Computers

I have a new computer now. While this new computer is spiffy and in every way superior to my dying laptop, it does lack one tiny little thing -- it has no bluetooth interface. This may seem a small thing, but it also means that I have no way of getting pictures off of my camera phone, which in turn means I can't stick up pictures for my blog posts without going through my laptop.

This is making it trickier to post. I'm working on it. Sorry.