Problem Machine

It seemed like it definitely did spoil the film

New one for the month. I've been remiss in listening to the other ones posted here, hopefully will catch up a bit later Sunrise at the Undead Cafe

Glorious

Fortunately they start talking in the evil voice as soon as you accuse them, so the lack of evidence isn't a problem

The problem with fucking Clippy though is it always makes your cd tray pop out

Confused me a lot when I first tried to play, not helped by the interface apparently not always recognizing clicks very well, but it was pretty fun other than that. I dunno if it was cheating but I used my graphics tablet: A more demanding, streamlined version of this could actually be a pretty neat tool for practicing pen strokes. Like, if it wanted perfectly straight lines and perfect ellipses and graded you on how close you could get.

I really like how you used the Zelda 2 soundtrack for The Wizard, though in retrospect it may have just been playing in my head and not through my speakers. Still!

Enjoyable!

edit: Why that was completely the wrong topic to post that joke in

Granted, but it's still not exactly unheard of to market something specifically as being unhealthy.

People have been calling cigarettes 'coffin nails' for more than a hundred years and it doesn't seem to have hurt their popularity much

If you have a darth dooku you should see a doctor though

yes but in English Dooku sounds like Dooku so how the fuck did they ever expect us to take someone named Count Dooku seriously?

Nope, kept in two separate holsters. This is the second case I know of, doing absolutely zero research, of a fatality caused by the officer confusing one for the other. The other case I know of happened in Oakland while I was living there and had a movie made about it.

I don't think we'd discovered England yet in the '40s

I can't think of anything upon hearing 'Shropshire' other than the Looney Tunes Daffy Duck as Sherlock Holmes pastiche. "Name?" "Shropshire Slasher." "Occupation?" "Shropshire Slasher."

Man, I don't go much for posters and stuff, but a framed print of that would be pretty rad. edit: Hm, looks like prints cost $24 (or $12 for a smaller size). Maybe sometime...

I don't drink much, and I'm finally running out of the whiskies I bought when I was last regularly employed. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to afford to get more. I have a couple of shots each left of Black Label and an Irish whisky my brother gave me for my birthday, and about 1/3rd bottle of good scotch I'm determined to save for a special occasion. It's strange, though, to see those bottles left with a couple of fingers in them, and drink all that remains of the time when society at large valued my contributions.

I think in the Leftorium episode Homer showcases a very human, petty kind of dickishness rather than the overblown cartoonishness of later episodes. Actually, the gag where he's imagining successively worse fates for Ned, gets to the gravestone, says "ehhh too far" and goes back to imagining the store failing could almost be a joke making fun of later episodes if time worked that way.

I remember when Chris was talking about the weird feeling of watching people play Spelunky and having the remaining time on the video slowly counting down until their otherwise unpredictable demise, and felt the same kind of spooky predestination as the conversation slowly wrapped in on Owen Wilson's nose, as the title decreed it must.

Yeah, unfortunately mockery tends to very much play into their narrative of being a grass roots resistance to oppression from a cultural elite. I mean, that's probably the only reason they have that narrative, it's entirely constructed for convenience. Not that that's necessarily a strong argument against mockery, since it can be a useful tool to point out their hypocrisy, but most of the people willing to listen have already gotten the message there.

April 13: I just came up with this idea a couple of hours ago and it's still pretty rough around the edges. Pretty much everything about this concept is still in flux, but here's the basic idea: Platformer (probably 2d) where you play as a little kid and are unable to navigate the environment on your own. To navigate the environment, you imagine a guy to help you. At first, all you can imagine is a guy who's bigger than you and can pick you up and set you down: As you explore, and see more of the world, you gain more symbols that you can use to imagine your man. So, for instance, you might see a horse and imagine a man who can run as fast as a horse, or see a tree and imagine a man as tall as a tree. I'll probably do this in Flash/AIR since that's my most familiar platform, and it's a non-trivial idea to implement technically. The biggest challenge I can foresee at this moment is making the man sprite able to be all the different shapes he'll need to be to fit the imagination and still animate decently. For instance, the man as tall as a tree would ideally be slender with incredibly long legs rather than just whatever man sprite scaled up 10x. Even though I normally avoid Flash's vector animation stuff, I may actually want to try to use it for this project due to its suitability to that problem. I'm not really looking for a team, but if anyone would like to get in on this I'm certainly open to the idea. Tomorrow I'm hoping to nail down all the specifics of implementation and have a rough idea of the scope of the game, and maybe throw together a very rough prototype.

Yeah, I'd just feel way better if it was actual obligations that were getting in the way, and not just my inability to focus on a new thing without my discipline immediately folding in on itself. I just can't think about this right now without being immediately exhausted and overwhelmed by all of the things I'd need to do, and antipathy towards doing any one of them. This is a problem I ran into last time I tried to do a jam as well, so I need to put some thought into how I'm going to get past this in the future. Oh well. This is all part of learning how to be a person who makes things. I can never really put anything down. If you end up finishing early though, yeah, maybe we can do a chopped down version for the last few days or something.I'll try to at least keep poking at it day by day and see if anything clicks, but for now any further progress is definitely a maybe.

Dammit I hate my stupid brain. Today I've been largely paralyzed by anxiety. I'm sure I could get this project done if I could just work on it for a week, but I don't think I can, because I can't focus or think about it properly or decide what thing to do before and after each other thing. If anyone wants to collab on this so that I don't have to spend 100% of the time on this in my own head yelling at myself then hit me up. Otherwise I guess I'm cancelling it, which I already feel shitty about but less shitty about than doing the same thing after wasting a week on weird anxious procrastination. Someday I'll learn how to be a real person. I am incredibly frustrated.

April 14th: Immediately scoped project way too fucking big because I'm an idiot. Got overwhelmed. Became sleepy. I basically just copied all of the code for my main project into another directory for use in this one. Fixed all of the major bugs that resulted, but since I need to redo the collision system with a simpler one (only square blocks, rectangular collision) it's not quite ready to build test levels in. I'll create that collision tomorrow, along with most of the basic controls and stuff. Mostly what I actually accomplished today was figuring out what all of the symbols the child can learn are and what they'll do. I was originally kind of thinking that you could slot each symbol into a different place for different effects (as tough as a tree, as tall as a tree, strong enough to lift a tree, etc) but decided that was both more cumbersome and less interesting than just giving each one its own set trait and description. As you go through the game, there are 12 different symbols to discover and a few secondary powerups, the most important of which is the ampersand. There are two of these in the game, and each one lets you add another symbol onto your imagined man. So, not only can you imagine a man as tall as a tree or as big as a house or as strong as a truck, but all three. In order to reflect these in the appearance of the character, I won't be doing vector animation like I was thinking but combining a few sprites for the character which can be swapped out. So the man has a leg sprite, a body sprite, and hand and feet sprites which can be swapped out or resized. I may also give him a randomly generated hat each time he's created, kind of like the random baby faces in The Binding of Isaac. This is obviously stupidly overscoped and I doubt I'll finish, but eh whatever let's see where it goes.