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.

On my own again

Last Saturday, in a torrential downpour, Whitney left to visit her parents in California over her spring holiday. This leaves me alone in the flat for just over a week. Already the flat seems strangely quiet, which I could probably view as a positive thing if I had any drive to do anything at the moment. However, I've already been enjoying the freedom of playing music without headphones, and even got a couple of songs finished that I'd been meaning to do for ages the other day. I could even connect my guitar up to the real amp instead of using the software one for a while if I wasn't afraid of subjecting anyone in the rooms around me to the hideous noise that I produce with it.

Some people (not least my own mum) have expressed doubt that I'm able to survive unsupervised for much more than four hours, and judging by my past record of cooking I think that's a view you could forgive. However, this time I have been saved by the way that out of nowhere at the beginning of the year somebody offered to send me about half a cow through the post, and Whitney took up the offer for Valentine's Day, leaving us with a freezer packed with boxes of meat from various parts of a variety of farmyard animals. So that's already formed part of my diet this weekend, and with some carefully-planned easy meals for the week ahead, I think I can get through this time without any real disasters.

And the latest kind of cornflakes in my continuous cereal challenge is Special K (strawberry variety). It's all terribly exciting.

The price of health

Have you any idea of the cost (with dental insurance) of getting your wisdom teeth out? It's $931. As if there weren't going to be enough painful extractions on that day. We have the bank balance to cover it easily (although it might shoot, stuff and hang over the mantelpiece any plans we had for a holiday later in the year), but it often seems that this country's government and health system has done nothing but rake more and more money out of me since I started applying to be allowed to set foot in it.

Now 's comment on the last post becomes much more relevant, as I naively thought that having both medical and dental insurance would be enough to bring it down to a reasonable figure. However, despite the surprise cost, I am still leaning towards being convinced that there is good reason to have them out now, as Dr Fine's opinion was more along the lines of "Get it done here, go to the surgeon in MGH, wherever you like, but whatever you do, get them out". Apparently I could also wait until my entire head becomes infected and then claim it under the medical insurance, but I'd rather do this soon than risk them getting worse and having to endure even more physical pain than necessary.

Overall that visit to the dentist last week didn't go as well as I'd hoped.

My rebellious teeth

My first visit to what I had begun to mentally call the castle of Doctor Terrible took place this afternoon - I've opened a new entry tag to record the development of this new storyline that life has thrown at me. In reality it's a nice enough basement suite, clean and quiet and only slightly funeral-home-like. Dr Fine is a little older than I expected, but nice in a pushy sort of way (but everyone in Boston is pushy, so it averages out to just being nice).

After filling out the obligatory confusing mess of an insurance and consent form while listening to the gentle call of high-pitched drilling noises, I was led through to a dental-looking room where he asked if I was from New Jersey (apparently the accent is very similar) and poked around in my mouth a little. After that, he immediately said that we'd better 'relocate' and distractedly led me down the corridor. I was half-expecting to be taken to a small dungeon somewhere, but instead I was shown to a tiny room with an X-ray lightbox and desk.

The consultation that followed was calm but not fantastic. Essentially, my wisdom teeth are all partially impacted, infected, extruded or exploded, and from just taking one look in my mouth he was surprised that I wasn't in complete agony because of any one of them. To look on the bright side, not being in agony even though my wisdom teeth are having such a hard time is probably a good thing - we must be more resilient in Britain. Still, he made it clear that they had to come out as soon as possible to prevent future catastrophe, and that process would involve a considerable amount of pain and swelling. Apparently there's also the very, very rare possibility that removing wisdom teeth will sever a nerve running along the jaw, but apparently Massachusetts General Hospital are rather good at repairing those.

So I had to read through and sign an absolutely terrifying sheet saying that I understood the risks of surgery and the possible problems (because as he says, America has too many lawyers in it), and I've been sent home with a leaflet called "Impacted wisdom teeth" illustrated on the cover by a large and happy third molar at a crazy diagonal angle. Now I just have to wait for a phone call from somebody from the office so I can arrange to get them removed from my head, and I'm sitting at home on the sofa eating chocolate biscuits while I still can.

MGS and CSI

My life tends to go through a set of stages in a cyclical pattern - sometimes I'll have extended periods when I'm in the mood for writing, musicianship or game-building (and you can tell which one I'm in by the relative number of posts I make to this journal or various other forums around the Internet). At the moment, after a brief spurt of activity on CT2, I think I'm slowing down again and am getting into the mood for creating... nothing in particular. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it allows me to have some actual free time instead.

I don't know what all that nonsense was about above, but the point is that Whitney and I were in Gamestop the other day to pick out a couple of PS2 titles after it hasn't had much activity for a while. Now that the next generation of consoles are becoming this generation, it's not uncommon to find at least a couple of gems in the second-hand bin, and on this occasion I found Metal Gear Solid 3 for $10. Meanwhile, Whitney picked up a CSI game, which I promise you is called "Three dimensions of murder", from the other end of the store - a surprisingly quick visit.

America has a slightly ELSPA-like rating system for games (in that it's separate from the film classifications) in the ESRB ratings. And the people in Gamestop ask for my ID whenever I buy anything in the "M" category. Do I still look six years younger than I am? I know I'm short, but I even had a rubbish beard last time it happened. In addition, this time the woman at the till cheerily told us that they had a seven-day return policy, specifically in case we wanted to bring back CSI after playing more than five minutes of it. That's what I call thoughtful service.

When we got home from our other tasks of the day, Whitney's CSI game went on first. And, indeed, first impressions were that it was an abomination. It could be vaguely described as something that might have come out of point and click adventures if anyone did them any more, but with said pointer stuck in the centre of the screen and first-person shooter controls added instead. I have enough difficulty with FPS controls through dual analog sticks, and I think Whitney finds it totally impossible to point in the right direction half the time.

The game consists of going from location to location via a dull overlong control-explaining loading screen that looks like something that would have been stuck on a demo in a hurry, clicking on things and then using appropriate equipment to gather evidence (you're guided by a vague likeness of someone from the TV version during this, so that you don't attempt to do things like pick up blood using tweezers). After floating around bumping into everything and clicking on them, you then go back to the lab, where the 3D engine wheezes and puffs as it strains to show more than ten objects on the screen at once as you spin round looking for the right bit of equipment to piece together, pull apart or compare the things you've grabbed from the crime scene.

It's not fantastic by any means, but it seemed oddly interesting after a while, if only to see what incriminating things you'd find in new locations as you gathered likely addresses. Games based on TV programmes don't tend to work very well (I have difficult imagining how even Knightmare could be done decently) and there's only so much you can do with a format like this. Dull adventuring, then, to sum up, but we're unsure whether to return it just yet, and I think that's just about the highest praise you can give it.

I had a brief go at Metal Gear Solid 3 in the evening - this was something that had completely passed me by when it was released, and I'd only played the demo of it before. And I say I played it "briefly", but the actual game time on my save is two hours in - Hideo Kojima is known for his long cutscenes, but so far this game's been virtually nothing but them. I'm unsure how I feel about the lack of a radar in favour of a camouflage system and ability to look round a bit further than before - it would certainly required a change in tactics if it would let you actually play the game long enough to work anything out.

Even though it's cutscene-saturated, though, you have to admit they're good (when they're not just half-hour-long radio conversations, anyway). I particularly liked the introduction of not-Revolver-yet Ocelot and his Red Dwarf-style automatic pistol ricochet shooting. But I'm not sure if it's just because I'm older now or the token supervillains really are more ridiculous this time, but it really does seem from the introduction section that we're going to be fighting the X-Men (complete with a creepy hornet-summoner, an old man with bulgey eyes and someone who I've chosen to christen General Electric).

So far we've just gone through the start of what I thought was the game, then in true Kojima style it ripped us out of that and put us in a different one, so I don't actually know what it's about yet and will have to update this as soon as something interesting happens.

Old Emails (it's as exciting as it sounds)

Somewhere in the depths of my Internet past, there's a Hotmail account that went unused and unchecked for about a year. Even though I used to retrieve emails from three different accounts in Thunderbird, I was forced to stop when Microsoft shot themselves in several of their own feet and disallowed all outside access to their accounts by anyone (not just new accounts as before). And their brave attempt to become the most patently useless email provider in the world was a success, because GMail was coming up at that point and everyone was beginning to realize that it was miles better, so many people left. And since then I've been trying to switch every Internet identity of mine over to "DavidN" and point them to my far more usable GMail account.

Yesterday, though, I finally discovered a workaround (not that I'd been searching all that hard before) - I'd used Thunderbird successfully for a while until it suddenly stopped working with Hotmail, but it seems that if you're using the WebMail plugin with the Hotmail extension, and you put your port number up above 1024 and switch to either "WebDav" or "New" as a way of retrieval, then you can magically access your Hotmail inbox again (not the sent messages, but let's not hope too much from battling with Microsoft).

And what came tumbling into my inbox was a year worth of spam that I had been quite enjoying not getting. Most of it was DeVry university offering me a useless degree - one of which was been going to be sent in 2009. The others are for unspeakable things in both English and a variety of foreign languages.

The rare cases were the ones that people meant to send to me. I had set up a "vacation reply" on my Hotmail account ages ago telling people to send things to my GMail account instead because that one was never checked any more, but either nobody listened to that or it just never worked anyway. The majority of them were from GameFAQs, because in my great refactoring I never bothered to update anything I wrote for that site with my new email - nobody ever contacted me about anything anyway until I wasn't checking it any more.

There was one from a forum member asking me about my maps for Unreal Tournament. When I wrote the tutorial for UnrealEd, it was at a point when I'd never seen a decent complete beginner guide (though the Unreal Wiki came along shortly afterwards and was a lot better), and my maps weren't exactly stellar, but I had a look for them all the same and linked him to what I could salvage from what I'd uploaded to Nali City years ago.

I didn't answer any of the others because they're too old to bother with, but they were all questions or suggestions about what to add to the guide - somebody mentioned some details about the barrel-on-wobbly-bridge section of Tombi, where I'd detailed painstaking instructions on exactly where to stamp on the bridge to tilt each section so that the barrel rolled all the way down to the river. He pointed out, quite rightly, that you could just push it.

Finally, there were a couple asking about the silliest-named game in the world, Syphon Filter - the first guide I ever wrote, and the only reason it's significant is that it details how to get past a common game bug that nobody else had worked out at the time. ( is also good at this - see this giant summary of what went wrong in Hexen II.) One of them was asking about putting tags on crates, which does tend to confuse a few people. But the other one was an email saying that the sender's son had been stuck on the first level for "close to a year". As far as I could tell, he could get into the bar that contains the first objective, then couldn't find the "communications array", which is a laptop sitting in plain view on a table with a giant arrow saying "Communications array" pointing to it. I think the only help I could have offered there was to advise her son to get a new hobby.

Vs. the Dentist

I'm honestly trying to think up something entertaining to say about Tuesday morning, but I'm not coming up with anything to make it sound less hideous than it really was. After ages of trying to forget about it, I had finally made an appointment at the dentist - the first time at an American dentist and my first visit to any dentist since Reading Week in my last year of university just over two years ago.

They're nice enough about it. I had heard great things about this dentist (some of them verging on disturbingly enthusiastic, actually) and it was a less frightening experience than the dentist I used to go to in Scotland, but after two years of being blissfully unaware of any problems I might be having, throwing the following at me came as a shock.

The first thing they discovered, to cut a long story short, is that my mouth is the wrong shape. After irradiating my entire head with the 180-degree X-ray scanner thing and taking a first look inside my mouth, the hygienist's first comment was that I have unusual extra bones in my mouth. My last dentist never mentioned anything like that, so maybe it's normal there and we really are a different species in Britain. She also described the usual buildup of nasty things I have around my gums, but said that most people clean them to a lower standard than they do in America - refraining just short (as I'd been afraid of when I arrived) of mentioning my vampiric British teeth and how they weren't anywhere near artificial-looking enough to be American. Instead, she said we would just have to be "very thorough", bringing over a tray of things that looked like miniature hacksaws.

I don't think you've experienced true psychological torture until you've had to lie still with sharp things poking around in your mouth while the entire discography of the Spice Girls plays in the background. I was stuck there for at least half an hour while she went over my mouth with instruments of varying size and hideousness, and eventually finished off by rubbing a bit of what looked and felt like cheese wire between them all. After that had finished, the dentist came through to have another look at my freakish mouth - he was bursting with enthusiasm and was telling me about the time when his uncle was involved in a car chase, but I've never been quite sure what to do when dentists talk to you while your mouth is clamped open and you're strapped to a chair, only able to make vague dribbly noises in response to anything that's said.

I'm now told that dentists in America say this all the time, but I was told that it would be 100% recommended to have my wisdom teeth extracted. Even though I'm not feeling any pain from them at all at the moment, the trouble with them lies in my wrong-shaped mouth and half of most of them are actually growing into my skull. As a result of that, a couple of other teeth around the wrongly-pointed ones might become infected, and they already have a few holes in them that I'm going to have to get fixed next fortnight. A week before that, I'm going to see an oral surgeon about my wayward wisdom teeth, and if he decides they need to come out, I will need to schedule an appointment for skull-cutting surgery followed by a few days of excruciating pain in my calendar.

Teeth are so badly designed.

Stupid things to do with "Wish I Had An Angel"

Just a few years ago, nobody knew what power metal was at all apart from a few people in Europe (and if one more person asks if I listen to Rammstein when I mention that most of my music comes from Germany I'm going to throttle them). But certain little subsections of it have crept into popularity, and it's now likely that a lot of people will have heard of bands like Sonata Arctica, Dragonforce and Nightwish.

The trouble with becoming popular is that your increasingly rabid fanbase can give you a bad reputation as a whole (e.g. Nobuo Uematsu, most Squaresoft games). A practice among particularly manic listeners that's become fairly common thanks to Youtube is making "anime(/animated) music videos" of films or games set to music. Sometimes they can fit - one of the most overdone is Kingdom Hearts to Sonata Arctica's 'Kingdom for a Heart' due to the quite unbelievable appropriateness of the title, but usually it doesn't matter how stretched or non-existent the link is between them.

As Nightwish's "Wish I Had An Angel" is what I'd hazard as one of the most popular songs in the entire genre - possibly because it combines harsh and smooth vocals as well as a power metal sound and an almost Europop-like beat - it's now been attached to a variety of unlikely things. Such as:

• Alone in the Dark (I should probably point out that this is actually the official one, but it easily qualifies as a stupid thing due to being written by Uwe Boll)


• Final Fantasy VII


• Brother Bear


• Doom (the film)


• Final Fantasy VIII


• The Sims


• Sailor Moon


• Dragonball Z


• Final Fantasy IX


• The Lion King


• Harry Potter


• Final Fantasy X


• Final Fantasy X-2


• Starlight Express


• Rammstein


• Kingdom Hearts again


• An entire tribute to Tails or Miles or whatever his name is now


• Just put up to double speed


• Lip-syncing it through your silly hair


• And an entirely nonsensical custom-made 3D rendered film!

Oh, and as I mentioned KH AMVs before, putting it to Modern Talking's 'Witchqueen of Eldorado' has to have a mention. That one's going to be difficult to beat.

Internet pecking order

Normal, rational human beings

↓

People with Livejournals

↓

People with Myspace accounts

↓

People who post on GameFAQs

↓

People who post on GameFAQs (not on the Classic Gaming board)

↓

People who post on the IMDB boards

↓

Other sentient beings

↓

Half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

The other half of the people on Daily WTF

↓

People who comment on Newgrounds

↓

Urban Dictionary contributors

↓

Worms

↓

Single-cell life forms

↓

People who comment on Youtube videos

↓

Jack Thompson

Let me know if I've missed anyone out.

Crystal Towers 2 - Behind the scenes

This is appalling, I'm sitting here proudly writing a Java-based solver to find solution paths through my own game, while sustaining myself by eating a pile of crisps directly off my desk. It's only a couple of steps from here to Linux and a Dustbuster.

Frosted Flakes Gold

If in the unlikely event that through reading this journal you've begun to care about me or my life, you may know that one of the things that I struggle with in America is the lack of Crunchy Nut, the breakfast cereal of choice that is totally unavailable without having to actually arrange imports of it from my parents' house ourselves. Every attempt to find something similar when I started living here failed. However, a couple of weeks ago Kelloggs brought out Frosted Flakes Gold, which sounded tantalizingly close - after a trip to the supermarket I've just come into possession of a packet and will try it out, in as live an experience as Livejournal allows.

As you'd expect, the box is coloured shiny gold, and it's also one of the toughest cereal boxes I have ever encountered. It's marketed as a healthier alternative to the original Frosted Flakes, and I'm sure I've worked off at least a few calories trying to prize it open.

Initial impressions are... surprising, to be honest - as soon as I opened it a strong sweet smell hit me, like the smell of Scotch tablet when it's in the molten proto-tablet stage. The look of it is also quite odd - the flakes are pale and much greyer than normal, looking perhaps like Special K. On putting one in your mouth you're hit by a sort of honey explosion that gradually subsides, but they remain stuck to your teeth like all decent breakfast cereals should. Time to dive in and actually pour in milk to taste them properly.

I've got to admit that these are almost entirely unlike Crunchy Nut. The honey is much more obvious and gives them an honestly rather medicinal taste. However, it's important that - almost uniquely among whole-grain corn cereals - they're not utterly revolting, and probably something I would choose to have for breakfast.

So I'm still going to have to put another phone order in with my parents, but they're not going to be relegated to the back of the cupboard until they turn to dust either. Probably the most successful in the search so far even though they're nothing like what I expected them to be.

<lj user="dr_dos"> grows funny creatures

SPTHWAP!

A few months ago, happened to mention a series of horror games by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw on his journal, and shortly afterwards a post of my own appeared detailing how absurdly traumatic they were. For some reason this account convinced a number of other people to download them too - which was pleasing, because horror games have this immense viral appeal to them in that you want to convince people to play them too to prove that you're not a colossal wimp and that they do indeed cause normal people to sleep with the light on for a week. In a continuation of this saga, today I sent off for the special editions of the series and I've been playing through them again.

The second time through, they're not too bad - the "director's commentary" is interesting, describing his influences and thoughts on his own game, and the extras like this are very welcome. But the biggest thing is that, even without Yahtzee's constant comments about how rubbish the game is or how rubbish the players were at said game, I can't believe I didn't realize how hilarious the possessed captain's death (where you have to whack him into the suspiciously exposed reactor) in 7 Days was before. Just listen to it - it's a lonely futuristic engine sound and tense piano, cut short by a loud noise best described as "spthwap", like Eddie Izzard's 'sword' sound effect.

I'm still not looking forward to Sunday, even though there's apparently a warning given in the special edition before you're suddenly killed. And I'm also a bit apprehensive about 6 Days because apparently there's an illusion scene in it that I didn't get but did.

You should still play them, you know.

Bonesaw

Nowhere near as horrifying as the name sounds at first, Bonesaw is a side scrolling platformer/sort of beat-em-up crossover written by Kyle Pulver (Xerus) - I think it's his first project of this scale, and it's an impressive release. It's also a relief to have it finished, because I was one of the testers for quite a while last year and I know it suffered a lot of unfortunate glitches just before it was released today (as everything does).

The title comes from a team at Clarkson University in New York who play a sport involving Americans zooming about on ice and beating each other with sticks, and while the "sport" bit of that doesn't feature in the game, the beating up is a major aspect of gameplay. (Their nickname comes from something to do with harnessing the power of Randy Savage, but I won't go into the details here.) You make your way through a variety of environments pummeling hockey players from St Lawrence along with fire-breathing onions, giant penguins, and most anything else that gets in your way, either with your bare hands or a variety of sporting equipment.

The game's graphics are relatively simple but gel together well into a consistent, almost Kirby-like style, and the soundtrack is provided by Josh Whelchel, who has really become a standout musician in the Click community in the last few years. His chippy background music reminds me quite strongly of Epic Games' titles in the 90s when Robert A Allen worked with them.

What I really like about the game is that it feels so reactive - everything has some measure of physics applied to it, and you won't find any typical platform game enemies that wander mindlessly back and forth until you jump on them (such as in, for example, mine). Enemies are thrown back by your attacks, can be pushed off ledges and will jump around to chase you, and there are whole sections involving trying to coax bouncing balls or imminently-exploding bombs into the right place. And it's pretty massive - I think there are well over 30 levels, each with multiple 'acts' or sections, and even after that's over you can go back and find Golden Pucks to get yourself access to an even harder section.

It's properly difficult, too - the levels themselves aren't too bad as long as you avoid the deadly sudden-death drops, but the bosses will hold you up for a while. It took me ages to even get past the first one, but importantly, it was the right sort of frustrating difficulty that got me to have "one more go" until I eventually worked out how to effectively damage and defeat it. And if you don't feel like doing that, there's also always the option of going back and charging up your Bonesaw so that you can go in and deplete all their health pretty much instantly, but you do end up feeling a bit of a cheat.

Download Bonesaw here!

Somewhere out on the Internet

For a long time, there's been this sort of unwritten agreement between two Internet subcultures as to what they will and won't touch. On one side, there's the furry fandom which tarnishes things we grew up with like the Sonic series, the majority of the Disney films and anything and everything else animated and anthropomorphic. And on the other side, the community of slash writers takes care of just about every other film or storyline involving one or more men, including Lord of the Rings, Torchwood, and countless others. (I'm well aware this is a bit of a weird introduction, but keep going, it gets even better.)

I could cope with that situation, but at the beginning of the week I was appalled to find out that a number of these individuals had turned their attention to power metal as well. I have seen many horrors of the Internet and haven't been overly fazed - let's be honest, you could rightly say I'm part of several of them - but there was a boundary line in my head, and this crosses it, smashes it to bits and reverses over it with a tractor. The introduction on the description page invites you into this new area of expression that features "love, loss, hope, insecurity, frustration, joy, addiction, disappointment, ego, failure, success" as well as the entire membership of Iron Maiden, Helloween, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson (among many others) in a gigantic slash mega-bender. I have not explored this area of the site any further.

But as if that wasn't enough, you'll be thrilled to hear that a significant number of these writers have been published in a number of collections and stand-alone novels. They have four individual categories for various levels of creepiness and insanity, but in reality all but two of the books have the tag "slash" and involves members of German bands talking in surprisingly English accents and eventually violating each other. One of the full-length ones involves Kai Hansen being kidnapped by aliens from Uranus, and the page shows an excerpt where he has to pretend he's homosexual to avoid a potentially appendage-endangering situation. I had to use a cache link for that because it mysteriously disappeared in between the time I saw it and the time I wrote this up. Maybe they're hiding.

This post has been unusually damning, I know, and normally, I'm all for people doing what they enjoy as long as they're being good to each other and not posting lolcats. But my difficulty here is that I can't get past the fact that taking anyone else's real, non-consenting and unaware personality and moulding it to your own will seems a bit... wrong. To stand against what must be a common thought, there's a quotation from the California Supreme Court displayed at the bottom of each page on this site. "Surely, the range of free expression would be meaningfully reduced if prominent persons in the present and recent past were forbidden topics for the imaginations of authors of fiction." And it did make me stop and think for a bit... but in this case I'd rather not know any more of what the imaginations of these authors of fiction have come up with.

The lesser of two evils

I couldn't help noticing that somebody has let that ghastly Ann Coulter creature on television again (well, I say "somebody" - it was FOX News, naturally), but what she has to say this time is surprising - apparently she'll support Hillary Clinton over John McCain if the two are running against each other because McCain doesn't hate gay people or non-Christians enough, or something like that. Nobody is sure what goes on in this woman's head, but if she doesn't like the Republican candidate then it's fair to say that he must be doing something right. I'm hoping that this means that the surprising number of Americans who listen to her will go for the Democratic side of the final presidential race, but equally it'll probably turn off those who are in possession of all their faculties of reason.

I don't have the right to vote in America yet because I'm too foreign, but the rest of them have a chance to get the place back to being a country again instead of a sort of international joke - naturally I'd love it if Obama won this time, but because the country doesn't have a stellar record of electing a suitable leader I'm trying to remain optimistic about the other two. Hillary's campaign has been... a bit dodgy so far, but at least her husband did something decent to the economy, and even if people go for Iraqi-bashing McCain instead, anything's uphill from where they are now. But that much was obvious already. When you have three candidates and all their individual merits are overshadowed by the way that they couldn't possibly be as bad as the last one, something is wrong.

Just nine months until it's over - looking on the bright side, it's actually flown past and most of the world is still here. Let's not do that again.

Clickteam at the TCEA

An interview with Jeff of Clickteam has appeared on an educational blog after the Texas Computer Education Association conference. Educational software is where Clickteam seem to be having the most success and most of the interview concentrates on that, though it also features a couple of commercial games developed using their software such as Robotopia. (There's a small mention given to the online score table. Guess who wrote that.)

No matter whether you're interested in the content, though, you have to respect him for having an entry on Metal Archives. Going from being the guitarist of a thrash metal band to IT and marketing is an interesting career line.

Crystal Towers 2 - Vertical Platforms

often mentions that his iPod has developed a strange sense of appropriateness in its song choice depending on mood or location. And it seems that my iTunes has become similarly self-aware - putting on As Long As I Fall while I was yet again struggling to get vertical platforms working can only be attributed to malice. After hearing the line "I don't hit the ground" while watching your character sail right through your carefully constructed detector you aren't sure whether to laugh or cry.

But after a lot of frustration this week, and even more whiteboard note-taking (Whitney got me a whiteboard for Christmas, and it was fantastic, because I'm miswired like that) I think I might have just got them working. Nearly.



I was always pretty fascinated by the state of whiteboards in the CS department after someone had been working on something for ages. Presumably every fragment of information on them is in some way useful, but altogether they always look like unorthodox impressionist paintings born from too many packs of Wine Gums.

Anyway, the real point of this overambitious week is that I now have a grand unified Platform object that can move horizontally, vertically or any direction in between. Have a look at the practical demonstration - graphics are very much temporary, but it shows the kind of thing that can be done, starting off with dull simple left-right movement but gradually introducing more elements such as vertical movement and movement by sine waves for swinging platforms.



Vertical platforms sound simple in themselves, but it took ages to get these working at all - with plain horizontal movement you only need to worry about moving left and right in the same way as walking normally, but if the player is to be moved vertically, you've got to work against the gravity that you've written and build in support for that. And as much as you know I like MMF2, there's something very wrong with its detection of collisions of objects that have moved during fastloops - the whole thing works by looking at one invisible detector underneath the player and another one on top of the platform, seeing whether they match when the player is moving down and while the platform is moving in any direction. But as collision detection was so erratic I had to switch over to looking at the positions of each object instead and decide whether they were overlapping based on that information.

Another problem was that as I was moving detectors and objects around so much on each frame, it became very difficult to keep track of where objects actually were during it, no matter how much I put into debug information during the loops. (MMF2 provides a debugger for examining each frame, which helps a bit, but it's actions before drawing a frame that I was worried about this time). So in the end, I made it up to the player object to decide whether it was on a moving platform or not - that's what the "OnVert" property that's still in the text at the top right of the screen is for. When a platform is told to move, it checks whether the player is over it first and sets the OnVert property to its own ID value before doing so, and this is later used to decide whether to allow gravity to affect the player or not.

The trigonometric movement of the platforms is done by giving each individual platform a "Type", and writing a special-case set of pixels to move horizontally and vertically for each of them (I finally had to remember differentiation again to work out how the swinging ones should move). I might be able to simplify it a bit by putting another couple of values on the platforms to specify where they should move to on the next frame, and let the game work out the actual distances itself from there.

Frankly I'm very surprised that you've read this far.

New videos and interviews

That's enough attempting politics - back to music again. Both Helloween and Gamma Ray have released new albums and the videos that come with them fairly recently (it was towards the end of last year, actually, but like I've said before America gets to know about these things much later than everybody else and I am failing catastrophically at keeping up).

To sum up, the video for As Long as I Fall by Helloween is utterly ridiculous. Not surprising from the band who brought you Limozeen in Space, but this actually looks a bit more like a Rhapsody video with a slightly higher budget in places. The band views are all right, very Metallica-like in that they're standing on a rock pillar that slowly crumbles away like a game of Kurushi even though it's surprisingly intact by the end of it. Instead, it's the daft Mortal Kombat-style adventure in between them that's the worst bit - what does any of it mean? I've no idea what the fat little devil is, either. I love the brief air-piano shot near the end, though. As for the song, it sounds slightly like Helloween are trying to become a pop group again, but with rather more success than what happened the last time Michael Kiske convinced them to go in that direction.

Similarly, the opener from Land of the Free II, unusual in being a direct sequel to an album that was released over ten years ago, is happy and enjoyable, and much more positive than anything Gamma Ray had to offer on Majestic - so it sounds like they've done what they intended and made a return to their old style between the times they were a political band and a sci-fi band. As for the video, well, on the one hand it's good that they now have a producer who has upgraded from using Windows Movie Maker and MS Paint, but on the other, I have to admit that this one's in very bad taste. I understand the point they're trying to make - freedom and liberty and the end of oppression and America and everything else they're usually on about - but the whole thing looks just a bit too bloody and Clockwork Orange for me to comfortably watch it.

The only real disadvantage with the band, I find, is that as much as he's respected as the driving force behind just about the entirety of the power metal universe, Kai Hansen does have a nasty habit of stealing other people's songs.

Also of interest are the two interviews with the bands that SPV did - Kai of Gamma Ray and Weiki and Andi from Helloween are interviewed by a loud prat with an American accent and all the charm, wit and subtlety of Timmy Mallett, and they appear comparably bemused by him throughout. Frankly I didn't expect Andi to have as deep a voice as he does in the video, and for the most part they're both rather understated, although there's quite an interesting explanation of where the idea of the song came from.

Quite apart from the hat he's taken to wearing that makes him look worryingly hip-hop, one of the most surprising things in Kai Hansen's interview is how he says that he's been listening to a lot of Dragonforce recently and is impressed by where they've got to. I also think it's impressive that a power metal band has got so much recognition, particularly in America, but why did it have to be them?

In fact, if I can finish on this unrelated side note, I've finally worked out what I don't like about them. It seems that most of the bands I listen to enjoy power metal because, well, it's a bit of a laugh. Dragonforce seem to be going for the younger System of a Down-type audience and teaching them that it's instead about being 3xtr3m3 with 4tt1tud3, and I'd like them a lot more if they stopped with the image of being the fastest band aliii-eee-ive and just enjoyed themselves more. Or took themselves less seriously, or something like that. I don't know.

Super Mega Ultra Tuesday

According to Google yesterday, I was the eleventh person in the world to use the term "super mega ultra Tuesday", but by the time I got to putting this up I'd dropped to 46th place. However, if it had been "super ultra mega Tuesday" instead that would have been even more painfully unoriginal, with 207 results as I write this. Anyway.

Super (and possibly both Mega and Ultra) Tuesday was yesterday, the day when most of the American states submit their votes for who they want to represent the two political sides in the upcoming Presidential election. The race that everyone is really interested in is between Obama and Clinton, and neither of them have come out ahead - Obama seems to be favoured by more states overall but Hillary is getting the more important ones (it's the delegates that actually count and each state has a different way of calculating how to use those depending on how everyone else votes). It seems that many people think that nominating Hillary would be putting Bill back in the White House, but you have to admit he did a decent job of it a decade ago (as long as he's kept locked up or supervised at all times).

On the Republican side, John McCain is coming out well ahead with about three times as many delegates as either of his competitors. The rest of the people I live with in Massachusetts went for Mormon nutter Mitt Romney, partially because he was our governor until recently but primarily because they're idiots. Apparently he thinks he's "going all the way to the White House", which would be a bit of a sorry outlook for the rest of us, but he's not really in with a chance now, so that's all right. The trouble with Conservatism is that it tends to drive people mad - it even made one man have an affair with Edwina Currie, so clearly has devastating effects on the mind.

Having said that, at this point I honestly wouldn't mind McCain as president, because he seems too old and out of touch to be able to do any real damage, or at least, not on the same scale as the last one. But the trouble with whoever gets nominated into the White House this time, no matter whether it's the first black/woman/zombie president, history is primarily going to remember them as "not Bush". And while that's a good achievement in itself, it's not really something to be remembered for.

Silent Force - Walk the Earth

Doesn't this look rather like the cover for The Fourth Legacy?

It's been absolutely ages since I actually listened to any new music. Recently I've been more involved in activities that don't lend themselves to a musical backdrop - namely transferring my songs to GP5s and failing to play along with them on the guitar. Combined with that, my music-buying tactic used to consist of wandering into music stores as I passed them and picking up anything I didn't have that I was interested in - but that's not really an option here because my entire existence is in the flat, in the office and on an underground line in between (not even mentioning the fact that European metal is even more difficult to find in America than it is in Britain). But I think it was that put an end to that by giving me Silent Force's Walk the Earth for Christmas.

When I've talked about albums recently I've gone through them track-by-track, but I know that this is a rather long-winded way to do it, and this type of review was discouraged by Metal Archives (or Encyclopaedia Metallum if you want to be quite agonizingly pompous), deeming them 'unprofessional'. An album is definitely a complete experience in itself - just working out the arrangement of songs is a difficult process, involving decisions like which moods, themes and speeds of songs go together or should be separated, and even length comes into the equation as well when you decide where to put your ten-minuters (the fourth and last tracks being my personal choice most of the time) - but in the end you're going to enjoy or dislike each individual song on its own merit. However, I've realized that at least one good reason for not going down to such an involved level is that invariably, as soon as you submit a review saying which songs you like and dislike, your opinion of all of them will completely change.

But I don't really have any standout songs at the moment, because in general, I have to admit that Silent Force's latest effort seems a little... flat, so far. There are a couple of different points that I find myself wanting to hear again, but I haven't yet identified anything truly amazing. In comparison, their last album Worlds Apart had some blindingly great songs and some absolute duffers - Ride the Storm was epic, Hold On plodded, No One Lives Forever was all right with a disappointing chorus, Heroes had so much power and energy behind it that it made you want to go and bomb the pants off Afghanistan even if you were normally relatively sane, and so on.

American power metal vocalists tend to be 'smoother' in sound than the Europeans, who have a harder, scratchier edge to their singing styles. DC Cooper, who has not yet emerged from the 80s, has as good a voice as ever and has even learned how to pronounce more than just the vowels. However, I'm honestly not sure if this is a good thing. I don't know if it's just being able to hear the lyrics better and therefore being unable to ignore them, but I think they've taken a definite downward turn in quality from the previous album - Worlds Apart had lyrics that made no sense, but Walk the Earth has lyrics that make no sense but are still recognizable as not very good.

If I was going to pick out standout moments, I'd say that Man and Machine has a good pre-chorus before duffing up the real one, DC's voice (does this man have a real name or just two initials?) on Walk the Earth itself is amazing, The King of Fools and Running Through the Fire are fast-paced and very enjoyable, but that's about it. In From the Dark is also good until the seemingly random chord changes near the end. However, according to the rules I laid out above, it's bound to become one of my favourite albums ever as soon as I hit this Submit button.