Celebrating its 31st anniversary, The Harmony Festival (and the adjoining Eco Cup environmentally conscious skate festival), will be taking place at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, CA, from June 12th - 14th. It’s set to be quite a shindig this year with musical headliners including Michael Franti & Spearhead, India.Arie, Matisyahu, CAKE, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Pepper & Rebelution. From the Pro Skate world, Bob Burnquist and Danny Way, plus PLG, Jake Brown, Andy MacDonald and Buster Halterman will compete on the mini-MegaRamp (175-feet long, 30-foot drop, 25-feet gap, 18-foot quarter pipe), and skate legends Steve Caballero and Christian Hosoi will be on site for judging, demos and meet-and greets. Many speakers will also give the 411, and these include Julia Butterfly Hill, George Noory and Daniel Pinchbeck, among others. Plus, there’s plenty of camping for this all ages, family friendly event.

The Best Part: Synthesis is giving away two pairs of tickets for any day of the festival, and one grand prize winner receives a pair of tickets for the ENTIRE WEEKEND. Sign up at http://www.synthesis.net/sweepstakes/ and get yourself into the game!

For more information about Eco Cup and Harmony Festival please visit their web sites (here and here), or read the full press Release After the Jump: (more…)

Guitar Hero is Huge.

ACTIVISION EMPOWERS FANS TO REVEAL GUITAR HERO® SMASH HITS SET LIST

Online voting at SmashHits.GuitarHero.com Begins Today

Santa Monica, CA – April 9, 2009 – Guitar Hero® fans can now cast their votes online at SmashHits.GuitarHero.com to determine the order in which songs will be revealed for Activision Publishing, Inc.’s (Nasdaq: ATVI) Guitar Hero® Smash Hits. Guitar Hero Smash Hits takes the most exciting, recognizable and fun to play music from genre-defining titles Guitar Hero®, Guitar Hero® II, Guitar Hero® Encore: Rocks the 80s and Guitar Hero® III: Legends of Rock, which were previously available for guitar-only in-game play, and delivers them as a compelling and dynamic full band experience.

Starting today, music and video game fans alike can visit SmashHits.GuitarHero.com to cast their votes for which previous Guitar Hero game they would like the set list unveiled from first.  Each week, a portion of the Guitar Hero Smash Hits set list will be revealed based on which prior game captures the most votes.

Guitar Hero Smash Hits feature the most memorable songs from Guitar Hero games together in one epic set list, including these tracks:
o   “Killer Queen” – Queen
o   “I Love Rock N Roll” – Joan Jett and The Blackhearts
o   “Bark At The Moon” – Ozzy Osbourne
o   “Them Bones” – Alice in Chains
o   “Killing in the Name” – Rage Against The Machine
o   “Message In A Bottle” – The Police
o   “Carry On Wayward Son” – Kansas
o   “Free Bird” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
o   “I Wanna Rock” – Twisted Sister
o    “Nothin But A Good Time” – Poison
o   “Barracuda” – Heart
o   “Through the Fire and Flames” – DragonForce

Turn down the lights, crank up the amps and prepare to command center stage as some of the most famous AND infamous tracks from Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock step into the spotlight in the most epic, full band jam session to-date - Guitar Hero Smash Hits. The #1 best-selling video game franchise of 2008 presents the best of the best to music video game aficionados so they can join together for guitar, bass, drums and vocals in-game and rock to master tracks of their favorite Guitar Hero music.

Featuring 48 master recordings, Guitar Hero Smash Hits delivers exciting online and offline gameplay modes including Band Career and 8-player “Battle of the Bands,” which allows two full bands to compete head-to-head online. Players’ rock n’ roll fantasies turn to realities as they create their rocker, compose original music and share it with the world through the innovative Music Studio, GHTunesSM and robust Rock Star Creator gameplay modes first introduced in Guitar Hero® World Tour.

Developed by Beenox Studios, Guitar Hero Smash Hits for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, Wii™ home video game system from Nintendo, and PLAYSTATION®3 and PlayStation®2 computer entertainment systems are scheduled for release in June. For more information about the game, visit www.GuitarHero.com.

I thought endless amounts of Mountain Dew and Cheetos was supposed to preserve you, not cause cancer. Hope he’s rolling that 20-sided die in the sky.

From Wikipedia:
In an email statement released by his family, it was announced that Arneson died shortly after 11pm Central Time, on April 7, 2009. Wizards of the Coast later announced that he had lost “one final battle against cancer.” According to his daughter, Malia Weinhagen, “The biggest thing about my dad’s world is he wanted people to have fun in life. . . . I think we get distracted by the everyday things you have to do in life and we forget to enjoy life and have fun”.

Yes, come! Come my pretties! To our SWEEPS PAGE. Yeeeesssss…..

“This part of the country is really beautiful.”

No it’s not. We’re in the Southwest and there is nothing to look at but highway, cacti and dirt. And thanks to our brilliant job of cleaning out the Gay Car before hitting the road we have no CDs to listen to. None…except our respective bands, and we’re waiting for the right moment to premier the rough mix of the new Gorgeous Armada album. With no music to listen to, road games are a must.

A decade ago Slug Bug and Out Of State Plate would have sufficed, but being that all the members of Fortress of Attitude are above the age of 14 (at least physically) we’ve had to develop new road games. Thanks to the communication age that we live in, last night Dr. Genius and I came up with The Predictive Text Game. Bomb Threat calls it “The T9 Game,” but that’s just because he’s too cool for school.

The Premise of the Predictive Text Game: You know how the T9 function on your cell pone works, right? You type in “2” “2” “7” and that translates to “C” “A” ”R.” Well, to play the Predictive Text Game, you read a series of numbers out loud and everyone has to figure out that word using T9’s rules.

If you’re not looking at your phone and you’re not used to texting a million times a day the game is actually pretty difficult. Just now, for the abovementioned example I had to go to the other room and grab my cell phone to know if I used the correct numbers for “car.” (Turns out I was right, probably because we spent a half hour playing The Predictive Text Game last night.)

In the above example the word could have also been “cap” or “bar” or “abs,” so those all could have been possible answers.  I have a feeling that if we keep this game up, by the end o the tour I will no longer have to look at my keypad when I text. And that’s a win

A total win.

The other day, some gamer hacked some highway signs in Austin to read “Caution Nazi Zombies” and other semi-lulzy variations on the Zombie attack theme, apparently referencing Call of Duty: World at War aka shit that no self respecting non-gamer person cares about. Still, points for creativity. Wonder how many idiot Texans believed it? Anyways, check out the video, then go hack some shit yourself. Or if you’re too much of an idiot, just go burn some shit in the middle of the street like the kids in Chico do.