Summer 09 Part Deux.

Wow so I've pretty much neglected writing anything here for almost 2 months, yeah I got kinda lazy / busy with other projects. But here's whats been happening since I last wrote.

The Bonus Stage has been gaining some ground these last few weeks, mostly in part to our Video Games Live coverage with the biggest hit being a Michael Jackson tribute video, gamer style seen here.

Sidebar: How weird is it that he had to die on my birthday! Jeeze way to take my thunder Mike.
In all seriousness I'm a pretty big fan of his music and have now found myself listening to more MJ than I care to admit.

Anyway back to TBS, we've been gaining roughly 5 subscribers a week now and have had almost 5,700 views total with almost 2,000 people looking at our channel. Now it may not seem like much but to be honest I never thought we'd do this good so it's all very surprising we've had this much positive feedback.
Even better being that the show might be picked up by a local production company to be on CCTV sometime in the next year, so we're really jacked about that. We're starting to really bring the show full circle and the quality shows, we now have game footage in HD and are recording on my new camcorder I bought from Mike in full HD so it's pretty great.
You can check out the show here and please subscribe if you like it.

So onward to other things.
While at VGL this year I happened to meet a new girl, her name is Carly.
She is Tom's girlfriends best friend.
She was very quiet when I first met her, she's just one of those people but immediately when I saw her I knew I had to get to know her better. After hanging out a few times we eventually started dating and are now together and to be perfectly honest I don't think I could be any happier. We seem to have a really good balance personality wise and with what we like. Food especially because I'm such a picky eater, anything I don't like she usually likes, so I can give it her and vice versa. For those of you who watch "How I Met Your Mother" it's the "Olive Theory".

I've been filling my time lately with her and I've been seeing a ton of movies, now I don't want to get into detail about all of them but I haven't seen a terrible movie this summer, and yes I did like GI: Joe, it was a fun movie to watch. Dumb as eff though.
This past weekend a movie I had been looking forward to for quite sometime District 9 came out and Carly and myself went to see it friday night.

First impressions: This movie is unbelievable, from start to finish it's captivating and the plot is so thick with undertones of racism and hatred for the "prawns" that it makes you feel like you could be watching stock footage of the jews in concentration camps. This movie has some of the best special effects I've ever seen, and not because they were over the top, but because they were done right. So often in movies today the special effects are cool looking but don't have the same charm as miniatures or the organic special effects of old. This movie however had the perfect blend of organic and CG. Interactions with the prawns are filmed so well that it's hard to tell if they're CG or animatronic. The whole movie has such a grit to it that you may as well be watching the events unfold on CNN or the BBC because everything is so real.

Now that I've had a few nights to think about it and really understand what the film is about, it's even more mind blowing than I could have ever thought, obviously I'll go see it again but not right away. It's a fantastic movie and by far the best movie of the summer hands down.


Ok lastly I wanna talk about my new project. I've been working and writing for about 2 months now and I'm almost ready to start filming. Now I don't wanna give to much away because I kinda want it to be a surprise but at the same time it's one of those things that would probably be alot easier to finish if I had feedback. Anyway the readers digest version is I've planned on doing something called The Jeff Ward Show, basically 3-5 minute videos, Monday, Wednesday, Friday about all the things that I encounter in daily life that piss me off. Things in the news, government, stupid people and anything else that puts me off. I have the YouTube channel already set up and if you want to subscribe go ahead, however there are no videos up yet, but I'm thinking of starting filming possibly Monday August 24th.
Channel

So that's it for now, I'm making a point to update this thing a little more regularly, however I have no idea how many people read this other than Mike sooooooooooooooooooo that happened.

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-JW