Before I get into the actual story, let me give a brief history of my roommates. I started out rooming with friends in dorms, and you can’t really go wrong there. Probably the weirdest thing that happened to me during this time was one of my roommates speaking in an Australian accent for a week, but hey, finals week does a lot to your brain. Eventually, however, your friends move on, you move on, and you have to find new roommates via craigslist.

Craigslist. Is there a more concentrated collection of freaks in the world? It’s literally a digital circus. So I’m moving to Utah Valley University, and I see this room listed for about $350 a month, pretty good deal. The guy selling his contract offers $100 if I take it. I didn’t get to meet my three roommates beforehand, and luckily, 2/3 were normal. However, all it takes is one roommate, one guy to ruin your whole living experience.

My brother came to visit me and he saw this huge, 400 pound dude walking down the street in all black snowgear in the middle of May (goggles, hat, etc). He thought it was kind of funny, so when he got there, he told me about it. That was my roommate. I was very literally rooming with Newman from Seinfeld. I mean, imagine Jerry’s situation but with Newman in the adjacent room. He looked exactly like him, was neurotic like him (not funny though). Every weekday at about 4PM, he yelled on the phone at his mom or something. And then after that he blasted the theme music from Scrubs, repeated like ten times. He cooked whole hams at 2AM and carted them off into his room for devouring. I also shared a bathroom with him, and at first I thought we had a carpet for our bathtub floor. A carpet made out of wooly mammoth fur. One time he got mad at me for leaving an empty can of soup on the counter while I ate it. I let him know that maybe he can clean up his pile of hair too. He would make the WEIRDEST noises in the shower, I mean, you could guess what he was doing, but then the next noise would throw you off. And we tried not to listen, but it’s kind of hard.

But anyway, that wasn’t the worst roommate of all time. I later moved to the Avenues in Salt Lake City to go to University of Utah. Our house had overall cool roommates… until one of them had to quickly sell his contract. To someone on craigslist.

It turned out to be this guy and his girlfriend in their early 20’s. We sat down and got to know them. They seemed okay. They got kicked out of their last place because the guy punched a hole in his apartment’s window and wouldn’t pay for it. Okay.

I then woke up one morning to have cereal. Well, my cereal was gone. How about just some milk? No, my milk was gone too. The guy had started eating my food without asking. He apologized, but that was the first red flag. Then my roommate and I were watching a basketball game when he came into the living room.

“Hey Zach, how do you use your electric razor? It’s not working for me.”
“… why are you using my electric razor?”
“I just need to shave.”
“Don’t use my electric razor.”
“Okay.”

Our house started smelling smokey. Every room smelled like smoke. Those who smoked did it outside, as far as we knew. But I suspected… the roommate. So I climbed up some stairs at the adjacent apartment complex and gazed down into his room. Sure enough, he was smoking into the vents. He was trying to hide the smoke, and didn’t realize that the ventilation shaft reveals it to everybody in the house. We told him to stop doing that.

One time I stayed home from work and was just on my computer in my room. He opened my door slowly and started coming in. I said, “Yes?” He was kinda startled, and stammered, “Sorry, I didn’t think you were home.” He left. I was really disturbed, especially because he did it again the next week. The question lingered: what the hell was he doing in my room.

A few weeks pass. Now, every other night the bathroom smelled strongly of bile. You can probably guess who it was, but I didn’t really know for sure until I saw him leaving the bathroom with a bucket. He put the bucket outside and ran into his room (which by the way was the most disgusting thing ever). His girlfriend confessed to me that he was bulimic. So he was eating my food and throwing it up!

And okay, that’s kind of sad, but you have to understand, we soon found dark splotches littered across the carpet of our house, like he was just puking everywhere. When I moved out I had to threaten my landlord (also a very shady guy) with a lawyer just to not have to pay him money in replacement of a deposit refund.

Oh, and he was a heroin and cocaine addict, both of which I found out as I was leaving. At the time, I was not surprised. I’m sure if I had stayed rooming with him, things would have kept escalating, like he’d kill one of us or something. Let this be a warning to you people: make good friends and room with those friends.

I’m not trying too hard with it. Maybe calculus is something I might need to implement in a future career, but honestly, if it is, you’ll find me hanging from a lamppost before I choose that career. I’ll make a rope out of all the money I get out of it.

So instead, I’m trying to put it out of my mind. The other portion of my summer’s free time has been spent writing/recording music. Instead of choosing the money route, I’m going down the artistic one… there’s something to be said for not letting your robotic needs dominate your thoughts, and money is one of those. Creating art, however… allows you to refill your senses in case they forgot why you’re even on this spinning rock at all, just one in a billion little ants. Then I guess you start comparing your art to others’… but that’s letting money and attention get in the way again when they don’t really matter. They’re the most basic urges we have to overcome.

Sometimes you just feel like a lifeless robot… and painting a picture or recording a song is like taking a fragment of your soul and realizing it into something your senses can actually detect. So you know it’s actually still there.

A group of custodians are starting work at a research facility on another planet. A planet, they’re told, has a strange atmosphere. Air that if breathed in can cause horrifying hallucinations. And when a freak accident causes the air outside to leak into the facility, they find out firsthand just how terrifying air can be.

We had ten people total in our group working on things from scene design to voice acting. It got us high marks, but unfortunately, it was not able to be viewed at University of Utah’s machinimafest because of projector issues. Still I’m pretty happy with what we did. There are a few small issues, but it’s pretty solid for what we were working with.

“Scatterbrain” is mistakenly missing from the credits for his awesome “cheesy.mp3″ which was used in the training video.

Fast forward to 2010. In CS 3505, we got our programming team going again of Wesley Simon, Jason Butcher, Michael Goleniewski, and myself to make our own version of the popular “Duck Hunt,” this time adding two player multiplayer support, dynamic music, scrolling background levels, and a boss. No dog. We called our game “Duck Slaughter”:

It’s kinda fun but at the same time, pretty amateur. There are quite a bit of errors still there, and there is a crazy jump in difficulty going into wave 2. No high scores list going. But if you have two computers on the same network running the game, you should be able to play together via a complex network protocol, which was the hardest part about making it.

I don’t know if we’re going to add anything else to it. We got a high grade, so I’ll probably move on to make something more creative for the iPhone for my next programming project.

Download:

1. You need .NET framework 3.5. Most newer computers have it, but you can’t play the game if you don’t.
2. Download and run setup.
3. When starting the game for the first time, hit the “home” button -> create new profile -> scroll down to see “create a local profile” -> enter name -> done.
4. Enjoy!

Hopefully, this will be “Disc 1″ of a three disc Soundtrack album. The discs being separated by color (red, blue, and green), and each disc sounding completely different. This one will be red. We’ll see if it expands into that. I’m done writing the music for the other discs, but who knows, once I’m done producing them maybe they’ll be their own album. But anyway, I hope you enjoy!

“Holy crap, this is fantastic. Making Silence especially has a rich, sweet sound to it that’s perfectly placed after the ambient formlessness of much of the preceding.”
- Aaron Haynes

“The opening of Sun Swallow totally made me prick my ears up and pay attention, and then when the distortion and fuzz kicked in I was fucking hooked. Experimentalish little things like the reverby guitar in Song You Can’t Hear just push this whole album into a brave and super-creative other territory.”
- James Humphreys

“I really loved this album. Sun Swallow sucked me in straight away, amazing vocals…really liked the riffs in Living On The Screen…Making Silence is just phenomenal. Two thumbs, more people should get this.”
-Guy Collins

Below is a video of it in action, kind of explaining how it works in more detail than I can put here. We never got a working version of it out to distribute through Steam as this is pretty much just programming practice for all of us, but I DID put together a snazzy video using Windows Movie Maker. Music used is some summer bassanova by Leslie Wai.

The Machines from Zach Adams on Vimeo.

Simon & Garfunkel also have some other really sweet songs like Cecelia or Mrs. Robinson, but this is their most political. It’s very intensely condemning of society and actually doesn’t really fit with anything else they’ve ever done.