Met with Gene, Lauren, and Ed Badasov and showed them my Baghdad ideas. (Ed B. made up the working title Prince of Persia.) The storyline didn’t impress them much, but I think they saw promise in it.

It doesn’t really matter a whole lot what they think – I’m the one that has to do it – but it sure as hell wouldn’t hurt to have them enthusiastic. In a few months I should have something to thrill them.

I’m starting to get psyched to write this game. Slowly.

Apartment hunting with Steve Patrick. We checked out one place with a pink carpet, dusty chandeliers, and an old-lady landlord who said she doesn’t like renting to kids. “They make a lot of noise,” she said. “They invite their friends over.”

“Not me,” I said. “I just got off the plane from New York. I don’t have any friends.”

“Oh, you will,” she said, ominously, sounding like Yoda in Empire. “You will.”

Steve and Tomi told me I can stay with them until they kick me out.

“You should live in the Marina district,” Doug advised. “You’d meet a lot of… (pause)… yuppies.”

Looked at a house in Mill Valley, on a shady road winding through the redwoods. When I rang the doorbell the lady peered around me and said, “Is your mother down there?”

She spent fifteen minutes showing me the house, but I don’t think I ever quite convinced her I was serious.

Spent much of today working on the logistical problem of how to get the footage from a VHS tape into the computer. I finally (tentatively) settled on photographing the frames one by one with a regular 35mm camera, getting prints made, then (after retouching as needed) digitizing the prints with a regular Sony video camera.  It sounds like a pain but I think it’s the best way. 

Another solid workday. Today I stayed till around 7 and got DRAY pretty much finished. I tested it out by digitizing a page out of Muybridge. It’ll do what I need it to do. It could use another day of work. Actually, I could keep working on it for a month, if I didn’t have so much else to do.