Rock Band 2 Endless Setlist completed

My other achievement over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, in a literal and Xbox 360 sense, was completing the Rock Band 2 "Endless Setlist." This is fairly insane, as it involves playing all 84 songs contained in the game in one gigantic set with no breaks. It took my friend Shawn and I over six hours to complete. Admittedly, we completed it on "medium" difficulty (and five-starred every song, thankyouverymuch), but given the difficulty of many of the later songs in the setlist and the exhaustion point approached at the 6 hour mark, we could not have done it any other way.

We earned two achievements for completing this task:

1) The Bladder of Steel Award (no pausing and no fails on any song); and
2) Vinyl Artist (completion on "medium" difficulty as opposed to earning "Gold" for completing it on "hard" or "Platinum" on "expert" difficulty)

So, I present to you, proof:

Scalzi and Kowal in San Francisco

I'm late to the party with this post, but I had a great time over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend in San Francisco. I kicked it off Friday night by attending a reading by John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal at Borderlands Books. The place was packed:

It was an orderly crowd, but everyone was enthusiastic and the laughs flowed freely. Each author read short fiction pieces that were good, but it was when they interacted with each other that the magic happened. It was obvious they were having fun, and consequently all of us had fun. The final "science fiction comedy improv" topped off the evening to great applause.

If you're interested, a fan recorded the entire event and it is available online.

A few more pics:

Nice Monster EP release party

I saw a great show last night at one of my favorite spots here in town, the Fox & Goose. My friend Chad's band, Nice Monster, had an EP release party there. From the band's page on Grayscale Records, the music is described as "Melodic Math Rock." I'm not quite sure what that means, but I like the music. It's a nice mix of acoustic guitar, bass, drums and keyboards with just the right amount of Stratocaster.