Reading for April, 2006
The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. Notes to follow.
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl.
Company by Max Barry. Funny for about ten pages, then it just becomes tedious and sloppy.
Oh, and I also listened to a books-on-tape version of The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. This would have been nine hours of agony, but I was able to adjust the pitch control on my tape player and speed things up a bit. A dreary book.
Reading for March, 2006
Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans. I’ve been a fan of Watt-Evans for a while, though for some reason his books are sometimes hard to find. His writing has always been of a consistent quality, unlike a lot of the other stuff on the fantasy and science fiction shelves. As he has gotten older, he seems to have become increasingly cynical. In Dragon Weather, he creates a protagonist who loses his family and is then sold into slavery, and after escaping vows to seek vengeance.
His books have also gotten longer, and this is the first volume of a trilogy, following the trend of every other fantasy writer in the market today. But I’m not sure I like the story enough to continue.
Stanisław Lem died on March 27, 2006. In tribute, I read Eden which I bought at a library book sale many years ago. Lem’s descriptions always make me feel a little queasy, and I’ve never been able to reread any of his stories.
New spam technique
Spammers are now creating junk domainnames (short nonsense words made of numbers and letters) in an attempt to avoid blacklist filters. Of course unless a large number of junk domains are used, it is easy enough to add one or two domains to the blacklist and defeat an ongoing attack.
I’m going to have to dump Movable Type soon.
Brandon Rickman, printmaker (ii)
I have the following print for sale, right now in the Art by B Rickman store:
This print was completed in 2002. This is a reduction woodcut in four colors, 8″ x 5.5″ on Stonehenge paper. There are 12 prints in the edition. and I have only 3 copies left.
Reading for February, 2006
Rogue Star by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, the third part of the Starchild Trilogy.
The Giver by Lois Lowry, winner of the 1994 Newbery Medal. And then I read Gathering Blue by Lowry as well.
That’s it for February. The rest of my time was spent feeding and taking care of the new daughter. And playing Civilization IV.
Comments Disabled
I am disabling comments due to a particularly nasty spam attack.
I escaped from the room!
A high-production, interface heavy, and ultimately uninspired “locked room” puzzle can be found on the Firewall promotional site.
Spoiler:
Untitled Project Day 6
[Project in progress]
Okay, trying to wrap this thing up. This is the point at which the Flash IDE becomes useful for building the interface structure. If you’ve got your code properly encapsulated, then constructing an interface around it won’t cause too many problems. Most “Flash game designers” start with a timeline animation, however, and then never get around to creating the critical interactivity that makes the game fun.
I’ve got a splash screen, with a generic button in the lower left corner. Click the button to start the game. Find the three buildings which change locations as you move around.
Untitled Project Day 5
[Project in progress]
I spent about half a day on server-side stuff, creating a php script that will accept high score data (as CGI params) and put it into a MySQL database. The script does some rudimentary checksums to prevent spoofing.
The second half of the day was spent on “alien display” and “alien move logic”. The aliens (disguised as buildings) only move when you are on a different block, and there can only be one alien per block. Once you find an alien (by clicking on it) the building will turn bright green. One alien will move every time you change blocks. The result is a little too erratic, esp. if you have already spotted two aliens and are looking for the third, as the alien will always seek to avoid the player. It is about as fun as trying to guess a random number, over and over again.
In the current version the city is a 3×3 grid and there are 3 aliens to find. A nine block city is about the largest I can make with 51 building assets. The file is 238 kb, which is getting heavy for a stupid flash game.
Hotel Oscar Tango Echo Lima
I just came across HOTEL – an interactive tale by Han Hoogerbrugge. Mad doctors, naked clowns, freak accidents, everything you could want in an interactive tale. Nine out of ten episodes are currently available, the series started some time in 2004.