I've gotten into a bad habit where I'm holding out on updating my blog until I have "good" stuff to share. That's not the point of the damn review blog posts! Here's what happened from the last blog through this past Wendesday, even though I'm writing this on the following Monday.
I did end up updating the textures on the house in my yard render like I said I might in the last update.
Not perfect but adds a lot of verisimilitude I think! Still gotta add photo textures to those missing banners and import all the characters and stuff I built last year. I'll also add the new guys I'm building soon. I know where I want them but need to make some decisions about how they'll be staged.
DJing on Friday was great! In the days and hours leading up to the gig, I reorganized my music library, removing stuff I'm never going to play and sorting everything else into two playlists: one for songs that have a strong four-on-the-four beat, sorted by tempo (which covers disco, house, and pop), and one for everything else. Each playlist is like 40 hours long! It's a little overwhelming but it made the improvisational mixing I like to do much less stressful. People seemed to generally like what I got up to out there. I hope to do it again soon. (Not sure if I've mentioned this on the blog, but I've totally paused on music production while I get Halloween done, and the absence means I'm very excited to get back to music in November.)
I spent all of Saturday at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach. I had a really great time, although I think a lot of that was due to the fact that I had a free VIP pass. (I applied for this as an amateur haunter in Southern California and was approved! I felt very honored.) In past years when I've paid for a regular pass, the very very long lines for the mini haunted houses never seemed worth it. I felt quite guilty passing by those huge crowds in my special little line off to the side, but I think it's now spoiled me, and next year I'll either decide to pay for a VIP pass or just not attend at all.
One huge bummer throughout the event was the prevalence of AI-generated imagery. All the little bars around the convention hall had menus that were clearly pooped out of ChatGPT; a couple vendors were selling prints and decorative videos (for projecting in your window on Halloween, for example) that had the uncanny jitter of stable diffusion; at least one of the people on the haunters panel was touting merch with that fake block print look that a lot of AI "art" has. It was so depressing. This shit cannot implode too soon.
Here's a weird place I saw in Long Beach between the end of the convention day and the beginning of the official afterparty. The interior is so tiny and completely empty; the branding the proximity to the convention center made me wonder if this was set dressing for something, but it appears to be a real business:
I spent like twenty minutes at the afterparty. I did not care for the vibe.
On Sunday was the first session of the Producing Deep Dive Series at Hatch Escapes, which is what it sounds like. I attended an earlier, lighter, single-day version of this last year, a big overview of what it takes to produce immersive theater. I found it utterly intoxicating and I'm so glad to be learning more! There are about 20 of us from all different backgrounds and levels of experience. My personal goal for this is to leave with a better sense of how to work with other people on this kind of thing. Apart from friends chipping in on painting or paper mache or load-in and installation, I've generally worked alone on all my immersive/installation/themed entertainment stuff. Seeing how other people actually work with and for a team is so helpful in seeing where my intuition lines up with the professional status quo and where I need to learn some new management techniques. More to come on this I'm sure.
Halloween work was a little delayed this week mainly because I spent about 12 hours (and counting) playing Big Walk. It is phenomenal. At our peak so far, my walking crew included eight people. That is so many people to coordinate! It reminds me a lot of playing escape rooms with a mixture of friends and acquaintances and strangers, finding connections with people I don't know well (or at all) while simultaneously trying to gently and gracefully contain the damage from people that are not getting what is going on or don't care or don't want to work as a team. I'm absolutely loving it.
As I mentioned, I'm writing this on Monday but trying to only discuss things that happened up through this past Wednesday, so I'll be back in a couple days with lots more. Cool things are happening over here tbqh!