A quiet night.  Getting back to real life.  Working on the site.  Browsing the forums.  Missing my kid.  Normal reconquers very quickly.

This past weekend was strange and taxing for the lot of us.  I spent about 2 straight days in the sun (I’m red to prove it) with Micam and learned that with a little practice he might be a pretty good driver (at 4) at least on Mario Kart Wii.  My entire family was here minus a couple and those present had the opportunity to spend some time with my dad’s ‘lady friend’ upon my demand.  Carla (my girlfriend) and Christine (my ex) met each other.  And my eldest brother (who recently turned 50 - we had cakes - I made two of them) entertained the kids by shooting off some old Estes model rockets that were sitting in the basement.

Now, you would assume that: new matriarch figure + old lover meeting new lover + explosives would = one hell of a weekend.  But, it was actually quite calm.  The most accosting moment I had to endure was hearing the question: so what’s going on with this Myst thing?  My sister Jill had brought light to the question as she picked up Myst DS at Best Buy on Friday and it was laying around for all to see.  (My my.  I’ll keep my comments to myself.)  I think my answer was acceptable:  I don’t know, I’m taking the weekend off.

In the meantime, out in New York the server is getting hit even the more - press is growing, things are moving, and for some reason some link spammers decided to target one specific post on this site to hit with like 160 spam links over the weekend - which we had to happily decline.  Comments are now turned off on that post.  (We won.)

And, then, back to work.

At 10 this morning I got a call from Adrian who wanted me to check the web for the 1up article as soon as possible.  I was unfortunately in my car at the time.  After getting to the office, I took a look to see that we were front and center on the main page of the site with Adrian’s bad pun shining and immediately Google Talked a coworker who’s a hard gamer and follows 1up pretty closely.  He’d already seen it.  What followed afterwards was only what I can imagine to be a small dose of hero worship.  Which is weird stuff.

It’s really become shocking how commonplace things get after a while - not to say we aren’t grateful, but just getting used to it.  Hearing that we’ve gotten a big write up used to mean that we’d soon be flipping around outside celebrating, and now it’s turned in to a quick review in fear that something was presented horribly like the reporters who have for some reason introduced us as two guys who have zero film experience and have never written a script before.  And then on the flip side, new press always means loads of new e-mails of support and requests to participate (which we are very very thankful of) — but there are always a few that are just a little bit creepy.

I hear guests on the Diane Rehm show all the time that they bring on as commentators.  They’re fresh voices, usually from the blogsphere and have little if no traditional training in journalism.  And they’ve referred to how the readership of their blogs explodes after having originally been a guest on the show.  One guest, I forget who she was, even introduced that she picked up a couple of stalkers soon after and had to take appropriate action.  That’s … odd.  And makes me ponder the very nature of celebrity.  With the mass of trash magazines out there about what happened in Hollywood yesterday, I can imagine how things get twisted - but I also wonder how the actual celebrities cope with it.  If ever a day comes when I’m this big successful filmmaker with loads of money and press, I’m still going to go to Starbucks for my latte; I’m still going to play Mario Kart with my kid; I’m still going to burn all the hair off my hand making burgers on the grill during the weekend.  I wonder if I’ll still feel really uncomfortable about getting notes of praise as well.

Time to get back to work for a little while.

11:58 pm

tags: 1up, carla, celebrity, chris, family, micam, myst