posted on 2.22.12 Today is my fourth anniversary at Destructoid

My very first Destructoid article, a 570-word piece containing my impressions of the MLB 08 The Show demo, went up on February 22, 2008. It’s actually not as embarrassingly bad as I’d anticipated it would be.

This is a big personal milestone. Not just because of the amount of time involved, but because of what’s transpired in the interim — specifically, how much my life has changed since then, and how different I am today. You do a lot of growing up between the ages of 21 and 25.

Some things haven’t changed, of course; I’m still broke, and I’m still living at home. (OK… I guess, technically, I was dorming at Columbia four years ago.) But I don’t feel like a directionless kid anymore; writing about videogames is the career I want, and I hope I can really make that happen this year. (I better, because once December rolls around, I won’t be able to get health insurance as a dependent anymore!)













(No, seriously, does someone want to hire me and give me a salary + benefits? That’d be great. I write good about them sporty games.)

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posted on 2.8.12

I write for a videogame website (it’s called Destructoid; you should check it out some time). But yesterday, I received a non-videogame-related press release. It’s not a rare occurrence, and I almost always delete them with the quickness.

But I’m keeping this one. The title? Breaking // 900 Pounds Of Butterfingers as Gift To Wes Welker Delivered to Copley Square [photo here]

Yep, I’m gonna savor that for a long, long time.

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posted on 12.24.11
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Samit Sarkar - “The Christmas Song”

Last year, we at Destructoid put our heads together and recorded The Destructoid Christmas Album. It went over pretty well, and my contribution — a cover of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” — turned out fine. (For more details, check out my original post.)

We thought, “Why not do it again?” Fewer staffers contributed this year, but I think The Second Annual Destructoid Christmas Album is just as full of holiday cheer as the inaugural edition. I decided to record a version of “The Christmas Song” — y’know, the one that goes, Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…

The recording process was a bit more ambitious this time around, because I decided that in addition to my singing and guitar playing, I wanted a bass part. Unfortunately, I don’t own a double bass, and my keyboard doesn’t have it as one of its built-in “instruments,” either. So I went with something called “finger bass.” I still didn’t have a better option for recording the guitar part than sticking my Rock Band microphone in front of my guitar’s sound hole, and this year, I decided to use the same mic for recording my singing (even though it doesn’t have a wind screen, which isn’t ideal). I recorded and mixed everything in Audacity.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t expect to hear a brilliantly engineered recording when you hit “play.” I’m sure someone could “tweak the levels” to get a better-sounding song, but I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to that stuff. Still, I’m not unhappy with the final product.

Enjoy, and happy holidays!

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posted on 6.3.11

A week ago, 2K Sports invited a bunch of journalists (including yours truly) to a press event at Citi Field before a Phillies-Mets game. We met the winner of the Major League Baseball 2K11 $1 million perfect-game contest, a guy named Brian Kingrey from Hammond, Louisiana, and I wrote a story on Destructoid about him.

They had the journalists play Kingrey and try to get hits off of him, just like last year. I was the only one who got a hit against the 2010 million-dollar winner, and I won a Jose Reye-autographed Mets jersey (which I promptly gave to my brother, a Mets fan, as a graduation present). I also won this year, and I got the item in the photo above: a baseball autographed by Roy Halladay! I think I’ll hold on to this one…

For the full story, go here.

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