Summer Status Updates

Album Two Update: Boot Camp for "Deep" is done. Finishing Boot Camp for "Comets" this weekend. Recording still scheduled for next week. Super stoked.

DJ Kyelzbub recording his vocals for the "Deep" boot camp demo while I stand around wondering what's for dinner

Book Two Update: Re-writes are 90% complete. I've contacted my editor to let her know it's coming soon. Super stoked.

Video Game Update: Team Cat lost to Team Dog in the 4th of July Splatfest, even though Team Cat won more matches. Not stoked. Up to level 18 now. Signed up for Team Water Slide for this weekend's Splatfest. I can only play this game for around thirty minutes at a time before I get burnt out, so I found a new hidden gem to take up the time in between: High Strangeness.

So far, this game is like Zelda-lite with a dash of Earthbound-style humor thrown in, which means I totally love it. The 8-bit/16-bit switching thing is very reminiscent of the 2-D/3-D flipping technique in Super Paper Mario or the wall-merging ability in A Link Between Worlds, which is really cool. The puzzles are straightforward and relatively simple, which is good for players like me who have to resort to using walkthroughs to solve the more complex ones in the Zelda series.

TV Update: The new episode of Gravity Falls, "A Tale of Two Stans," aired on Monday. Watched it, came away super stoked.

Daughter and I loved that Ford was voiced by the same guy who did Tenzin in Legend of Korra (and yes, I know that he's done some other stuff, as well). Spent too much time afterwards geekily trying to reconcile the timeline with all of the characters' ages (if Shermy - Dipper and Mabel's grandfather - was an infant when Ford and Stan were seniors in high school, then that means he would have been around twenty-nine when the twins were born??)

Music Fanboy Update: My good buddy from Hawaii turned me on to something cool going on in Japan called "kawaiimetal", or cute-metal. This is when you take the sugary-sweet vocals and choreographed dance routines of J-pop (Japanese pop music) and forcibly graft it onto brutal, face-destroying metal riffage. The result is something like this.

P.S. I bought their album.