Staying Alive in Boston

Here's another advert spotted in the subway. The last one of these was remarkable just because of its sheer absurdity, but this one gives completely the wrong message to me.

The caption off to the side, which I couldn't get in the picture for fear of falling on to the subway line, happily declares "Good thing he has health insurance". So rather than being an encouragement to get health insurance so you don't end up paying more out of your taxes (which, while I'm on the subject, is a pretty stupid idea)... it says that it's a good thing because if you knock down one of those annoying cyclists with your giant monstrosity from Bloody Enormous Motors Ltd. with enough force to dent your number plate and front bumper, at least he can pay for the repairs to the remains of his knees and bicycle!

We've almost abandoned office now. The minute we managed to get someone to agree to buy our furniture in preparation for moving out on May the 16th, the building we work in decided to do something about the lifts, and sent all the office managers an email about how fantastic they were going to be. However, I came in from one of my 11 possible remaining visits to the sushi place across the road to find that they'd missed the point by several hundred thousand miles.

Rather than operating any more quickly, or having any of the grinding noises or worrying bouncing removed, the big change is that they have wood panelling on the sides. The change is comical - they've only stuck these bits of decorated plywood on to three of the walls, and left the scratched doors and intermittently working button panels completely intact (in the same state that they look like they've been since the Cold War). In fact, the only effect of this is to make the lifts slightly smaller - and also slightly heavier, so if the cable can't keep up this might just be enough to finish them off for good.

This illustrates quite a large reason why we're moving out. I don't think anyone here's going to survive for much longer.

Jam, pigs, banjos

Last night we went to see Eddie Izzard perform at the Orpheum Theatre. He really hasn't changed much since his earlier standup years, though he does look completely different when he isn't in transvestite mode. I think it may have been the first live show of any description I've been to since seeing Iron Maiden in Glasgow about four years ago, which may have contributed to the way that it was oddly difficult to remember that I was actually there and not watching him on television.

He did mention the names "Jeff" and "Steve" several times (and putting up flags), so as far as I was concerned I got my money's worth immediately. Other topics covered included:

• Crap Samaritans


• Why nobody would vote for Jesus if he used his real name


• German-Latin


• Mac updates, and licence agreements that contain "We will shoot your grandmother out of a cannon"


• Spartan sheep


• Having to finish before "The Riches" starts


• The creation of the planet - "How is it?" "Still on fire, Dad."


• Problems with Noah's Ark


• Instructing someone who put a purse onto the stage to "please set fire to it"


• Giraffes communicating via charades


• Life on Mercury


• Bored appendices and why they're like Aliens

And so on. It was as hilarious as you'd expect, though the experience was only slightly marred by the theatre itself - I'm certain that it was originally built by dwarves, as there is literally no spare legroom at all. I am - and there's no way around this - as short as Richard Hammond, and it was uncomfortable for me to sit with my knees squashed up against the head of the woman in front for two hours, so I can't imagine what it would be like for anyone even slightly taller. Thankfully we were on the end of a row, so we had a bit more stretching room, but even so, if you go to this place you're guaranteed never to complain about another economy flight ever again.

Synthesis Externalization

"Ooh, yes, I've finished all the backend stuff and I can get to work on seriously making the actual game now" is what I've been saying in virtually every entry on this for the last year and a half. But it never really stops - if MMF has one specific weakness it's its modularity, in the way that for the most part event lists are tied to frames, and the result of this if you change something in one game level you need to go and copy and paste it into all your others (not to mention keep track of which one has the most up to date list that you want to synchronize). But this weekend I've been trying to make things easier for myself in that respect.

You really need to plan a game of any decent size from the beginning if you want to finish it within your lifetime, and Crystal Towers 2 has gone through a lot of changes that would have been much easier to cope with if they were in from the start, so I'm performing a great refactoring to speed up the rest of the game and this time really have something I can just add on to. Initially, the game relied on itself for its data - abilities, items that monsters could drop, and so on - with a couple of external plain text rules files for things that I wanted to be able to change easily, like the missions for each individual level. That was fine at first, but as the game began to balloon up beyond all proportions that I ever imagined it to have, I started an Excel spreadsheet detailing all the data in the game as well. And as I realized I kept having to replay the game to keep track of where I expected the player to be in terms of progress at each point, I then wrote a Java solver that used yet another version of the data in the game to tell me the possible "moves" from each position (with a completion of a level or gaining of a new item counting as a "move"). So up until last week, I had to keep four copies of the game's data up to date with each other, with only a slight link between two of them offering any sort of intelligent reuse of information. This is what we in the computer science world call "a nightmare".

It was actually when looking at the external rules files for Civilization II that I realized how stupid my current situation was, and decided that I'd better do something about it. I had previously thought to myself that it would be nice to read all the game data in from the spreadsheet that I was using to stop myself going insane rather than having to copy it all in manually afterwards, but I had dismissed that as being too insecure a way of doing things and I didn't know if MMF's database connection object could read Excel files without Microsoft's additional gubbins installed. But those Civ 2 rules files gave me an alternative idea - I was fairly confident that somebody in the world must have put together a way of reading Excel files from Java, so I could get that copy of the data into my solver fairly easily, and once I'd got that, I could get Java to write out the rules files itself to be read by the game.

So this is roughly the alternative communication between files that I have going on now - everything is connected and sourced from the same place instead of having each part hovering around looking lost. Thanks to a bit of planning ahead when I converted the save files over to a better system, I also have the option of encrypting the data and making it uneditable while still allowing the game to load it (which will be very important for the online scorecard system) - this happens through a separate MMF translation application. The parts of the game that used rules files already have been easy to convert, as all I've had to do is write a translator in Java to gather them from the database and put them in a form that the game can use. There have also been parts that relied directly on data in the game, which were more difficult to convert as I had to come up with ways to externalize them.

For example, one of the biggest problems I had with the old system was the list of items that each enemy could drop. I had initially written it so that each enemy detected when it was about to be destroyed, picked a random number and dropped an item based on a list of hard-coded chances. With the new system, it instead leaves behind a "SynthCreator" object, gives it its name, and allows a global function to take care of the rest. This function performs the dice roll, looks for any entries in the "drop" rules file that match the name it's been given, and creates a dropped item accordingly. The whole process is so much simpler, even if it did take a weekend to convert everything over to using the new and much easier way - all I need to do now when an adversary is destroyed is create one object and start the function. While I was at it I also externalized the damage that different damage types cause to each monster type, the amount they take off your own health when you blunder in to one, and so on.

Changes like these, along with trying to move everything possible into the global event editor (which I was wary of as it was rather unstable in earlier releases of MMF, but it seems to be absolutely fine so far) make the events of each level much simpler to understand and work with, as they just need their own unique events rather than a copy of the ones that are used throughout the game. So this time, I really am confident that it's taking shape.

It helps that the graphics I have from Jay Frudy are fantastic, too. I'll put a video up at some point to save you reading all that.

Crystal Towers 2 - New Bernard

As I haven't updated on this in over two months now, you might have thought I'd forgotten about it - but I haven't! My creativity for it seems to come in bursts, and while it's still a much larger project than I ever intended it to be, I've finally got down to planning out a definite list of collectable abilities. Even putting a cap on those is a large step in working towards something that's finishable.

The really exciting news is that I've secured a new graphics artist. He's the same one who worked with me on Special Agent a couple of years ago - the fact that everyone else who has offered to do the graphics for this game so far has gone into severe depression shortly after starting hasn't discouraged him at all! And as a result, Bernard has had an overhaul. I can't quite express how exciting it is to have something this much more animated compared to the original sprite - it really brings the game to life instantly.

On my end, a lot of work recently has gone into the planning side, which is sometimes dull but necessary. Previously, I had four separate things to update - my plan spreadsheet, Java solver, rules files and the game itself. This was naturally terrible. However, after getting an Excel parser working in Java the other day (which was triumphant until I remembered I use OpenOffice), I have the Java solver getting almost all its data from the plan spreadsheet itself. Now, if I can think of a way to get enemy drop rates read from an external file, I just need to write a similar parser to write out rules files from the spreadsheet as well.

In short, I must be mad. There are times when I wonder why Whitney married someone who does this kind of thing in his spare time.

Music News: Michael Kiske Goes Even Madder

While looking up The Song That Makes You Want To Kill Yourself on Youtube again (as thanks indirectly to Whitney's encouragement I have accidentally learned how to play it), I was surprised to see that Michael Kiske had released a new solo album. It's called Past in Different Ways, and even though it lives up to its name, it's the strangest one yet.

For those who don't know his history, I should explain - despite being one of the initial successful lineup of Helloween, Michael Kiske had the unfortunate situation of hating metal even though he was something of an iconic voice in it. So after he tried to turn the band into a Beatles-style pop group with songs like the one I linked above, they kicked him out and got an emergency vocalist to bring them back again. Meanwhile, Kiske himself decided to become James Blunt and released a lot of acoustic pastelly music while wearing a daft hat. (I have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to get Whitney into his new albums just for the sheer irony of it.) Though his alleged hate of metal hasn't stopped him from making guest apperances with virtually everybody else anyway.

And on this new album - as I realized while I scanned down the track listing, and is hinted at by the title - he's taken the old songs that he wrote for Helloween and reworked them as he wanted them to be. Mellow. Compare A Little Time (original version) and the new alternate-alternate version to get a summary of the level of surrealism that we're dealing with here.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution

しまた!

I realize that I'm slightly late in reporting this and everyone with an interest probably already knows, but Noitu Love 2: Devolution was released today. Written by Konjak, it's one of the best-looking MMF-produced games I've ever seen.

Like I said previously, it's also unusual in not being freeware, and costs $20 to download - the price is a little higher than I was expecting, but I wouldn't say it wasn't worth it. I haven't bought it myself yet, but that isn't the reason - it's because I was finally inspired to carry on with a bit more of Crystal Towers 2 today and starting to play this would immediately remove all hope of progress again.

As I've also mentioned, if you're at all interested in seeing what the independent game community is capable of now, at least download and try out the demo. It's been extended since the last time I linked to it!

Download the second demo

Good Things

There was a Scottish couple on the train in to work today. That might not sound remarkable in itself - I didn't even talk to them, just stood and listened to the familiar accents, but it was strange how comforting it was to hear voices like that again, even if the woman did sound like Lorraine Kelly. When you're somewhere you feel foreign even after close to two years, things that would normally be unremarkable stick out greatly.

But even though I continually go on about America and how nobody told me it would be this different or strange or full of Americans, I was thinking last night about just how much I had to appreciate - I've got a good job doing something I enjoy, with good people (and the 10:30am start helps too), and overall we live very well for a couple straight out of university if we put aside the $35,000 debt as a technicality. The SAAS will soon no doubt be asking me for more money because I gave them £1000 last year and the coverage of payments for that must be running out by now, but that will probably be taken care of because we're moving out of the office in May and I might find myself with a pay rise because of the reduced cost of rent (reduced by $6,000 a month, actually).

Last week had a landmark day - it was the first day of the year where it was warm enough not to bother taking a jacket to work. I have two separate jackets - the giant Antarctic explorer one that everyone knew me for in university, and a leather one that I've had since third year of school. And the weather has been hovering around the leather jacket stage for a while, but it seems that it's beginning to be bright and sunny again - which is just as well seeing as my leather jacket is beginning to fall to pieces. It's rather worrying that I've never had it relined since I got it second-hand ten years ago, but also rather worrying that I don't seem to have grown at all since ten years ago either.

The bright weather does have one disadvantage, and that's that Clipboard Force 1001 will soon come out to convince everyone to give them all their money again, but you can't have everything.

Now spell CHZO

For someone who's experienced three years of Andrew Melville Hall and has been living in Boston for another two I like to consider myself reasonably mentally healthy. So once in a while it would be nice to have a dream that wasn't a traumatic distorted version of reality. Along with the genuinely disturbing ones that I don't want to recall at the moment, I've experienced things like mind-controlling fruit, loose eyes and night-long adventures that are just inexplicable.

Last night, the dream once again took place in my parents' house. I happen to know that somewhere in the house's basement there is an ancient Speak 'n' Spell - one of those bright red things with the terrifying attempts at voice synthesis that sounds like someone who's been smoking shredded tin foil since he was born. It was probably in my dream because I was reminded about Homestar Runner by yesterday, where it and similar artefacts of technology featured quite regularly.

In the dream, the device had somehow contracted a virus (who knows how. Perhaps it was airborne) and we had to find it before it did whatever the virus told it to do. After a search taking some unspecific amount of time, I walked into the downstairs bathroom and saw it propped up on the shelf at the back. And as I approached it, it started itself up and spoke, ensuring that I woke up with a start at 6am:

"Two... one... the Tall Man will come to kill you while you sleep."

I'm almost annoyed

I know that to a lot of people the sort of Firefox/general open source community seems like a terrifying place full of anti-corporate zealots with smelly beards, but in the end there's a very good reason for its existence. Today at work I spent four hours researching, experimenting and working around Internet Explorer bugs, on a new part of our system to allow people to select the members of teams that would vote on changes to a document. And as everyone who doesn't use it is making one six-billionth of my life easier, I thought I'd guilt trip people into converting over in case there's anyone reading this that still uses the abomination.

This is an entirely selfish thing - I'm ignoring the way that virtually every other browser is at least marginally faster than IE, free to download and more customizable (and in Firefox's case, leaks memory like a colander, but that's not as much of a disadvantage as you might think) because everyone's been told that already, and just concentrating on the advantage to me. And I'm not sure of the average technical Internet knowledge of my friends list, but I'll try not to talk down to anyone, provided that they haven't scrolled well away from this post by now.

The idea of the new form was simple (or so I thought). Our property-editing summary page gives you lists of the current people assigned to each team. From there, you can click "Edit team" to pop a window open where you can transfer more people into the team or take others out, then click "Submit", whereupon it'll close again, transferring the new contents of the "Selected" box into the original one. Dead easy (or it would be if most of Javascript didn't look like $A().$('${sel2}');).

But my problem (from Internet Explorer's point of view) was that I was using a rather handy way of telling web forms what to do called DOM, or Document Object Model. This lets you treat each part of a web page like individual objects, adding, deleting and editing them as you need. And for the most part, Microsoft is fine with you doing that, but on some computers (it doesn't even have the decency to be a consistent problem) you won't be able to move things between objects on different windows, and you'll get an error message saying "No such interface supported", which is naturally about as helpful as a water pistol in the Towering Inferno.

The way to fix this is apparently to re-register a couple of DLLs that may or may not be installed incorrectly, but you can hardly ask people to do that if they're the type that struggle with copy and pasting. Instead, I learned that Microsoft knew about their slight shortcomings in the field of sensible ways to handle webpages and had introduced a hackish fix - a made-up "innerHTML" property of each object on the page that you can use to directly edit the My old man's a dustman-type tags that you'll see if you go to View/Page Source up on your menu bar. So the solution was obviously (though slightly inconveniently) to write the bits that needed to be transferred into the page manually and stick them in like that.

Except... not only do they have a workaround to do something that everyone else has managed, they didn't get the workaround right either. Somewhere, it contains a bug that means that items in a select box may or may not be written correctly, and this rendered it pretty much useless for my purposes. In the end I resorted to detecting if someone was using IE, then building an array of arrays of strings that could hold everything I needed on the page, passing the whole thing under the table to the parent page through Javascript where IE couldn't mess it up and then cobbling together some items there from the collected data. Meanwhile, everything else can happily do it in about a hundred fewer lines.

Of course, the really frustrating thing is that our clients will never see this. Neither do most people who use IE and can't understand what everyone's complaining about. But it's the scourge of web developers everywhere for the reasons I've outlined above and more. So can you not do me a favour and download something else instead anyway? It'll take a minute of your time and I think you'll find it's rather better for other reasons, too. I don't even much care what you switch to - just as long as you realize that there's no reason on Earth to use IE7 unless you are actually being forced at gunpoint. Remember, like I said before you stopped reading this - everyone that switches over is making my existence just a tiny bit less stressful.

There, that should do it.

Sweet Cuppin' Cakes

Good news, bad news

Doctor Who comes back today	:)
We'll probably only see a slightly cut-down version on BBC America at some point in the next three years	:(
So I'm getting it off BitTorrent instead	:)
Catherine Tate's going to be in it	:(
She might not be as annoying as she usually is	:)
But the odds of that are pretty slim	:(
At least Steven Moffat is writing a lot of it this time	:)
So is Russell T Davies	:(

Update: AHH DEMENTED MARSHMALLOW CHILDREN

April Fools

It was Whitney who mentioned this to me last year, but April Fools' Day has somehow become something that I associate with the Internet more than real life now. When I was younger my sole imaginative idea was to creep downstairs early in the morning and swap all the plastic bags inside the cereal boxes round. Everyone expected it after a year or two, but that didn't stop me.

However, the rise of the Internet has allowed misinformation to be spread further and to more and more gullible people at an enormous rate. This year, everyone will have seen the video of flying penguins produced by the BBC. Another that stuck out in my mind was the Daily WTF reporting that it was changing its name to the Daily WTH, which a worrying number of agonizingly self-important readers believed. There was quite a good one from Apple that not many people saw, and the usual flood of links that trick people into watching "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley for some reason.

And unlike my cereal trick, I've never been able to think of anything good for the new Internet April fools. In fact, I'm surprised that out of the large amount of time I've been spewing collections of words onto the Internet through this journal, I've never even mentioned the day before. A good April 1st story needs to be something utterly absurd while still being somehow believable, so I'm not sure how that would be significantly different from my life in general at the moment.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution - Demo released

RUN SPIN JUMP HIT THINGS GO FASTER AAARGH

Well I never. Really, even if you normally skip over Click game posts - if you read one of them, read this one.

The demo of Noitu Love 2: Devolution by Konjak (Joakim Sandberg) was released at the end of this week. For all the versatility I claim of MMF, I do seem to talk about platform games an awful lot - this one is still a side-scroller, but the gameplay style really is unique. It follows in the footsteps of Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns from a couple of years ago, which was a NES-style beat-em-up that was impressive but never really grabbed me, largely because I was rubbish at it. But this one is a lot more accessible.

A tutorial is provided to describe roughly what you'll be doing. Control is via both keyboard and mouse, with an onscreen crosshair to aim and arrow keys to move around. You can click once to run up to the enemy and attack, hold the mouse button to grab, right-click to place a shield, or double-tap in one of three directions to boost or perform a whirly special move.

But none of that actually prepares you for the game itself - with the features like physics and hardware acceleration that have been added to MMF over the last few months, the games produced in it are getting more and more impressive, and I can promise you that I have never seen a Click game with anywhere near this sense of pace before. In fact, the only thing I can think of that it really compares to is Gunstar Heroes. Nothing ever slows down - it's even more manic than the average episode of Banzai. You have to blaze through a new mass of enemies at every step, hardly touching the ground for minutes on end, all the time encouraged to "GO! KEEP GOING!" by a flashing display at the bottom of the screen. If you're at all interested in playing it I recommend you do that before reading the rest of this, so that the surprise moments aren't spoiled.

It starts off with a wonderful use of misdirection. You begin in an office building like in the first game and therefore think it's going to be a pleasant enemy-bashing stroll, but before you've taken even a couple of steps, a giant helicopter pops up outside and shoots out the window. It then continues to chase you as you zoom along the floor, with chairs, desks and entire bookcases flying out in all directions. Jumping out a window, you land in the park where the rest of the level takes place, and have to alternately go through the mass of lesser robots and avoid attacks from the pursuing helicopter. Eventually you do get to destroy it, only to then be put up against a screen-high boat on tank wheels.

By the second stage you're bashing enemies pouring in from both sides and rocks from above while a slab of masonry scrapes and crumbles down a tower, and when you eventually reach the bottom you're immediately put up against a scythe-twirling spectre right out of Devil May Cry. And this is where the demo comes to an all too premature end. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this - it's the kind of thing that isn't just good as far as independent PC game standards go, and really could be on something like the DS, especially with the dual controls.

Now, to something that's a tricky issue in the community, and something that I'm sure the author knows will raise a lot of argument... it's not going to be freeware. The price has yet to be decided, but honestly, seeing the amount of work that's gone into this game and how it feels to play, asking for a bit of cash for it isn't misplaced. I promise I was actually shaking after having to rip myself out of the game quickly after it nearly caused me to miss my subway station, having had to concentrate just from the sheer pace of it. And the passenger next to me even enthusiastically asked me what the name of the game was so he could download it himself - that's never happened with any independent game before.

Play it, for goodness' sake. If only to see just what the independent game-making community can do with MMF now. Once again I'm proud to be part of it, even if things like this do tend to make my own efforts pale a bit in comparison.

How to make the Chzo Mythos even scarier

Even though the Internet should by now be the most impressive information exchange system yet known, we all know by now that it plays host to a miscellany of horrifying things and people. And I don't just mean the places where record-breaking thickness runs rampant - it also gives the opportunity for far too many overly loud people to voice their stupid opinions.

The world of fanfiction is responsible for a fair amount of this, because even though the trend of the Internet moved more towards audio and video recently, writing is still the largest direct window into what you're thinking. And as I've just discovered it completely by accident, I really would like to know what the writer was thinking when he came up with this chapter in what seems to be an epic.

Like I've said before, I'm not against freedom of expression but there are some things that you're just not meant to touch. I'm not going to say what the above horror is because it's interesting how it seems to come off in layers if you read it - it begins normally enough, then you'll realize what it actually is at the bottom of the first page and it'll seem like merely a terrible idea for a crossover. But then it'll keep piling in more and more unexpected characters from increasingly unlikely places until you snap under the strain.

(In case you can't tell, work's rather slow today.)

ZZT - Where are they now?

Being one of the last survivors of the ZZT community not to have drifted off into insanity, I am immeasurably fascinated with ZUltimate. It's a wiki that was set up about a year after I ran off after deciding I could no longer understand the community, and documents the people it attracted and the arcane in-jokes they built up over 15 years. Picking through it is like some sort of twisted electronic archaeology, uncovering layer upon layer of its unique form of organized madness and trying to translate it into something understandable. This is a decent example of the hive mind sort of mentality of it all - I don't know what it is about an ASCII-based game creation system that attracts these people in particular, but the minds in this place are truly unique.

I'll start with the obvious. I was slightly surprised to discover last year that Chase Bramlage murdered his girlfriend. (I should mention that no-one knows for certain what happened, either of the event itself or the outcome of his trial, but all signs so far seem to point to him being incredibly guilty.) It could be because I never really talked to him very closely during my time there because as far as I remember I was only intermittently in the forums and chatroom, but somehow this doesn't even seem very unusual. It's probably better to move swiftly on from this...

Less disturbingly, in general, quite a few members of the community tend to be associated with a variety of colourful (sometimes quite psychedelic, actually) substances. In fact I seem to recall that last time I poked my head into the chatroom one of the people there was in the process of having his door battered down by an irate dealer, but I could be remembering that wrongly. Drac0, for example, is now allegedly quite into his crystal meth, but with the amount of sense his games made before that habit started I don't think you'd really notice.

Mooseka went for a different approach, as out of all the substances he could have been caught taking, someone walked in on him when he was busily trying to ingest nutmeg via his nose. And then decided to tell the community in general about this, ensuring he would be mocked mercilessly for generations to come. I don't think that even this matches the sheer inspiration of burstroc, though. It seems that after a considerable amount of usually relatively harmless cannabis, he somehow believed himself to be Blat Hoople and proclaimed himself the President of Water.

By the way, if any of this is making any sense then I'm not telling it right. Even the less dangerously mental people sometimes had their moments - the ZZT community is one of the areas in which my usually good memory fails me, so I have no idea what I thought of all these people at the time, but I think that Wildkarrdex might have been someone that fell into that category. He did, after all, give a glowing review to one of my own little productions saying it was "nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be", and made a cameo appearance in another. I don't remember him being an administrator at any point, but according to the article, he was:

He used this position to spend his time reading everyone's private messages, and changing forum names into German translations of Twin Peaks episode titles. Administrative privileges were eventually removed when he added a word filter changing the letter e to something like "mumumumumumumumumumu", rendering the forums utterly unusable (but in this author's opinion, substantially improved).

And as for me... all things considered, I think I got off lightly. In fact I never really considered myself one of the in-crowd, not really understanding the mentality that a lot of the community shared, and it was enough of a surprise to discover that someone had honoured me with my own page that wasn't even particularly damning. I am still in contact with a couple of people in the community, but a completely different set of people from the ones I knew when I was still in it (who, yes, all right, are , , until recently who now goes to the same university I went to, and someone from the forums who occasionally pops up on my journal telling me to come back). And let's be honest, that's an improvement too.

One significant thing to be born from the community was created by Misteroo, who after several years around the ZZT and Megazeux boards reached such an advanced state of mental decay that he managed to produce the Arfenhouse series. (I have to confess that I actually wrote the rest of this post more than a year ago, never got round to putting it up, and everything you've read up until now was just an attempt to make it relevant again.) In the old days we were happy shouting things like "GREEN IS EVIL" and "OOF MON WHERE'S ME PIE" at each other over the forums, but from that chaos and disorder came... well, more chaos and disorder, actually, but packaged up neatly in the form of this series.

If you're not familiar with them, they're a series of Flash cartoons that allegedly involve someone called Joseph who is trapped in a dodgy Flash animation. Most of the storyline, or at least what's coherent of it, involve the Housemaster (who happens to be a slice of bread with some MS-Painted limbs around it) and the other inhabitants of the Arfenhouse - the heads of a dog, a cat and blue sphere named Woogy - being harrassed by a malevolent yellow ball with eyes on it called Billy. Though to be honest what actually happens in any of the animations bears very little resemblance to this plot outline. Subtitles are provided in something resembling the Dadaist language of FishIg. In a way it's quite an accurate model of what the ZZT forums would look like if they were somehow physical - a thought that is frightening indeed.

Let's be clear. You will not get this. Or this. I don't understand most of it. It will appear as a string of gibberish to the uninitiated, and a marginally more coherent string of gibberish to those who were in the community at the time I was standing around at the sidelines trying to make sense of it. My entire introduction to the Internet consisted of said gibberish.

I really miss it sometimes.

Mio Mao Mio Mao

Every time I mention anything I watched growing up, I seem to have to say it with the special disclaimer that I wasn't actually brought up on milk laced with LSD and what I'm remembering is verifiably real. Therefore, I should mention now that this isn't actually something I grew up with at all - instead, I saw five minutes of it at about 6:30 in the morning about fifteen years ago, and so unique was its dementia that it's remained burned into my brain ever since.

It's a claymation short from Italy called Mio (and) Mao. On the surface it's simply a programme about two stop-motion plasticine kittens, Mio (the white one) and Mao (the red one. Appropriately). I vaguely knew even at the time I saw it that Mao was the name of someone from China who was a bit dodgy, even though I didn't exactly know the details. But getting back to the video - these are no ordinary kittens, instead they're sort of mutant T-1000 kittens from the future. Nothing moves in a way that you would expect - things twist, morph and grow extra limbs when needed, and the titular characters themselves transform into Slinky-type tubes that turn end over end, unroll, turn into balls and bounce, flatten and reconstitute themselves, combine, separate, and do anything other than walk to get from one end of the garden to the other. It's absolutely incredible to watch no matter what age you are.

This one's quite good as well - it has a spider that morphs into bits of random mathematics. It's the cutest thing you'll see all week, apart from possibly a duck with tragically miscounted legs.

It's not often clear exactly what's going on - there's absolutely no dialogue, and apart from their signature cat/communist dictator noises all communication is in a strange sort of gibberish language that sounds like the sound man swallowed a few helium balloons and an entire bag of sugar and then recorded the best bits of the result. It seems some of the later episodes were broadcast on Channel 5 with an attempt at a translation over the top, but I think that takes away from the nonsensical flow of it.

It's rather nice to have it confirmed that I wasn't imagining this whole thing after all, and I rather miss when television could be as charmingly bizarre as this - that era still produced people who nearly grew up all right. I should also warn you that if you watch any of the videos that bloody tune will be stuck in your head for the next week. Oh, too late.

The Thing That Should Not Be

A sudden flurry of emails from LJ signalled that I'd just had my fourth accepted post on . This one is little more than a link, but it's much funnier than the last one because it doesn't involve me.

And judging from the comments so far I may have actually increased the sales of the abomination of nature quite dramatically. So everyone's happy.

Invisible Gear Solid

Progress through Metal Gear?! Solid 3 has been pretty slow so far. I had meant to carry on with it while Whitney was away, but somehow never got around to it during the week and then decided to wait for her to return again to continue together. And I'm still not sure where to place it in terms of how good it is versus the previous two games in the series.

I think the only bit that Whitney really hasn't liked is the scene just after you meet up with EVA, where Snake is finally handed a gun that doesn't fall apart within five minutes. He spends an inordinate amount of time absolutely ejaculating* over it, drawing attention to all its modifications such as balancing the grip, relining the barrel, extending the trigger, moving the flint-gaskets and filing down the cockflaps. So he's clearly meant to be a bit of a gun nut, but this is probably an advantage when you're stuck somewhere in Russia and about to spend hours in the jungle fighting a group of leftovers from the X-Men.

Similarly, his way of dealing with bosses so far is mostly by boring them to death. During the first two or three encounters with Not-Revolver-Yet Ocelot, rather than getting to any sort of armed conflict he just goes over exactly what he's doing wrong until he runs away like a big girl's blouse (or is hit in the face with a motorbike). Once you finally get to fight him, he's alternately gushing over how exciting reloading feels and pinging bullets off rocks at you like the Riviera Kid from Red Dwarf. With the addition of snakes biting at your ankles, I'm certain that the fight is much harder than anything I experienced this early on in the first two games.

In fact, the whole game seems a lot harder. Taking away the radar was a brave move, and I'm not sure how I feel about it - the nearest thing you get is a motion sensor and the ability to move the camera around a bit more, but it's hardly a replacement for knowing where each enemy's field of vision is all the time. It seems that you have to rely on luck while poking your nose around a corner or making a run for it into the next area, hoping that a guard you missed won't spot you.

And I miss the presence of guards most of the time, because I'm at a particular disadvantage here. Colourblindness normally only stops me playing very puzzle-oriented games that rely solely on colour such as Puzzle Fighter (I'm very pleased when puzzle game designers are thoughtful enough to give some other distinction to the playing pieces as well). But camouflage is a major theme of this game - in the previous ones I could at least see what I was trying to shoot at, but honestly, this entire game is green and brown, and the guards that are meant to be difficult to see for people with normal vision might as well be totally invisible to me. So Whitney has to be my eyes during the outdoor sections and tells me where to aim.

Despite that fairly major obstacle, at the moment we've just defeated our first unlikely Hideo Kojima villain - this one's The Pain, who is a large man who's covered in bees! and can get them to somehow form various deadly weapons while vomiting explosive hornets at you. He was actually quite a lot easier than most of the game we've gone through so far, because unlike everything else, I could see him.

* NB. This is a perfectly legitimate use of the term

Korma fried rice

I think I might have just invented korma fried rice by accident. If you're interested, this is done by attempting to reheat a previously successful chicken korma (the real kind, no tomatoes) by throwing the whole thing, rice and all, into a frying pan, and getting the amount of liquid wrong so that a vague yellow mass comes out ten minutes later. It tastes reasonable, though while it's far from my worst invented meal, I'll probably just order in pizza tomorrow.

The IRS sent us an important-looking letter with all kinds of red boxes on the front today, and I was afraid that it was going to be about fining us one squillion dollars for missing out one field of our tax return form. But after tearing off no less than three perforated strips that secured its contents, it turned out to be a standard letter about how much money we would be getting in the Economic Stimulus Act. (This is a plan that the government thought up a while ago that involves paying out up to $1,200 of their money per household in the hope that people will immediately spend it and help the economy. Apparently this makes sense in George Bush v2.0's head, though I can't help but feel he could have provided a better boost to the economy by resigning a few months early.

Apart from that and otherworldly invasions, nothing much has happened in the flat while Whitney's been away so far. I have been trying to play the guitar for at least some meaningful amount of time per night, and I've found that it's amazing how with a bit of practice your fingers can suddenly fall into place on barre chords after ages of them seeming totally impossible. I am getting rather sick of Canon in D, though.

I have joined Ultimate Guitar's forums in the hope of learning something new from being around other players, but so far it appears to be full of Kryptonite. However, it does instead spur the feeling that if illiterate marijuana-addled American teenagers can do this, then so can I.

The perils of an overactive imagination

But not, as you'll see, an overactive drawing ability. No game series should make you afraid of the dark all over again.