What’s Happening Now (+/- a few months)

Ah, that moment when you return to your blog and discover a ranty post you left unpublished in a flurry of despair. Still don’t know what to do about that one — I might post it soon in edited form.

Since my last post my PhD work has been both busy and stagnant. A flurry of activity centered around submitting an article and attending the Music and the Moving Image conference at New York University* was followed by a research lull** as I marked assignments. But things are finally starting to settle down a little. I’m looking a little more keenly at the music of EVE Online at the moment (surprise surprise), and I’ll probably do some work on L.A. Noire over the next few months too. I may also try to bulk up my understanding of procedural music by looking at Proteus, a beautiful little game a friend put me on to. I’m trying to avoid buying anything in the current Steam Summer Sale because my game backlog is already ~100, so as usual I’ll be toeing the line between a focus on contemporary games and the games I already own. And at some point I should probably think about countering the procedural biases brought about by only studying the Steam-available games I own.

Anyway, stay tuned for some posts that are actually about things.

*A really fantastic conference – about a full day’s worth of video game music papers!
**”Research lull” may be a relative term and may include time spent in social pursuits