Thursday, 27 February 2003

Orion Odyssey

Yesterday Michi and I went downtown to buy Master of Orion 3 and finally go to SFMOMA. Alas, EB Games and CompUSA didn't have it when Michi asked around 1pm. But EB Games said to check back later that day. So we decided to go to the museum first and then come back. When we arrived at the museum though we found out that it is closed on Wednesdays. Wtf?

So we went to Cartoon Art Museum instead which is just around the corner. Part of the exhibitions were really good. I really liked the "Hate Mail" exhibition that showed controversial newspaper strips for which the artists received lots of hate mail. I found all of them great! Some other strips displayed in the museum don't make much sense if you don't already know them because they are out of context. But that didn't really bother me. They had a lot of original art there so I looked at them closely to try to learn something.

My favorite piece in the whole museum was one by a local cartoon artist named Jason Shiga. He created an interactive comic strip in the form of a huge poster. You start to read the strip in the middle of the poster and then follow pipes from one frame to the next. Every once in a while you will have a choice of where you want the story to continue. For example right in the beginning this little boy is buying ice cream. You get to decide if he'll get vanilla or chocolate. Turns out the chocolate ice cream makes him sick, so the story is totally different from the vanilla storyline. And best of all, the comic even features a time machine. Yay! I really wish he would sell this as a poster. I found out that he sells it in comic book form though so I might buy that. I wonder how many of the books you need to make the poster yourself?

Afterwards we went back to CompUSA but they didn't even know what we were talking about when we asked for Master of Orion 3. At least I got to try out the new 12" Apple Powerbook. Whoa! I want!

So we went on to EB Games but they didn't have it either. They told us to come back today after noon. So we'll do that. They better have it today. I can't see Michi being sad like that. And the worst thing is that everybody else seems to have gotten their shipment of MOO3. We heard reports from people elsewhere in the Bay Area (like San Jose and Palo Alto) who didn't have problems buying it. You just couldn't get it in San Francisco.

  Posted by Edda at 21:49 CET