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| Friday |
the Eighteenth of April, 2003 |
"ho-ho-ho jingle-jangle! argle-argle! cluck clack *bradadada*"
I dashed off this automated sound-effect generator to aid
an MCiOS game -
one player offers a sound effect, and others attempt to rationalise it; the
original ISIHAC
version of the game uses obviously-scripted one-joke setups, but it's much
more interesting with pseudo-random feed noises. Seeing what patterns the human brain can see in the static, and being struck by how obvious they seem in retrospect. (That one was: turkeys enlisting the help of chicken rebels to hijack Christmas.)
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| Wednesday |
the Sixteenth |
"On the first 605 occasions something small, usually
infuriatingly minute, went just slightly awry and the whole delicate
arrangement was wrecked. A drop too much oil there, or here maybe one
ball-bearing too many giving a fraction too much impetus to the
movement. Whirr, creak, crash, the entire, card-house of consequences
was a write-off and they had to start again."
That amazingly Heath Robinson
car-component advert was not only shot for real, without a shred of CGI fakery, it was also filmed in one continuous take. And I still haven't
registered the brand of car it was advertising.
[via Joh]
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| Tuesday |
the Fifteenth |
I'm informed that the Electric
Sheep Screen Saver is very kevanish,
and it is. SETI is all well and good, but connecting the sleeping
computers of the world with visible feedback - the same
group-generated animation on every monitor - is quite glorious. It's
just a pity that it isn't more dynamic; more affected by how
many machines are asleep and where. Or available for Windows.
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| Behold a new, hastily-written comments system to replace the crashy backBlog one, which I'm fed up with - if you've made a backBlog comment this week which has now been lost, see if you can remember it and make it again.
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"The Game Protagonist. This is you, a nameless cipher of a person
who just loves picking up objects and toting them around, because you
Never Can Tell when they'll come in handy. Your goal is to fiddle around
with all these objects in any way you possibly can, so you can explore
your environment as thoroughly as possible and amass all the really
important objects, so you can get to the really important places.
Strange urges guide you -- whispered warnings from disastrous alternate
universes your player 'undid', oracular impulses to pick up the can
opener in the kitchen because it's the only thing you really feel is
important there."
Crimes
Against Mimesis; an essay on text adventure realism,
and how much of it can be sacrificed in the construction of
meaningful puzzles. An entertaining melange of wishful thinking
and the bleeding obvious, mostly, although the dissection of the
player mindset stands out - how it can be used to the story's
advantage, by having a protagonist whose motivations correspond
with those of the player.
(Has anybody managed to Escape from the SS Borgarís yet?)
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| Monday |
the Fourteenth |
A careless game invention which I must develop further:-
"Sko (n.) Ancient
Japanese board game where the object is to make the other player unsure
of whose turn it is."
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"I think that we believe there are chemical weapons in Syria, for
example. And we will -- each situation will require a different response
and, of course, we're -- first things first. We're here in Iraq now; and
the second thing about Syria is that we expect cooperation."
I was hunting around for this because Bush actually said "Sirius" when
I heard it on the Today programme this morning. Quite aside from the
Strangelovian effort not to end each sentence with "WE WILL BOMB THEM",
it's worrying how this arbitrarily-chosen
transcript is littered with hesitant, grammatical confusion.
That the Middle East is being reorganised by a man whose brain tells his
mouth to say "the second thing about Syria" because it vaguely
remembers using the word "first" in the previous sentence. I know
this is a dull, blunt, boring old cliché, I'm just depressed at how
true it still is.
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