bates on the google brig

(13:36:37) tobin: they should throw her in the google brig
(13:36:44) tobin: it'd be like a normal brig, but subtly better
(13:37:11) jbates: heheh
(13:37:42) jbates: like, the cell would learn your bar-rattling preferences and eventually rattle the bars for you at pre-appointed intervals.

and filters to boot

And they've got some nifty built in picture filtering too, that can be sent right to the web, apparently.

I was excited because I thought they were storing your pictures for you, but it's just dumping it into my rather limited blog storage space, so it's not as neato as I first dreamed. It's google, they have unlimited space. They could store my photos for me. Oh well.

Also, this is as big as they'll let me make the photos, which still appears a bit small on my browser. But I also have the resolution cranked pretty high.

picasa post

Testing out the new Hello/Picasa features from Google. Here's a picture on my desktop that should be transformed into a blog entry. I recently attended a pirate party, and this is me assaulting a scallywag with a camera. I've got more pics from the party that I'm gonna post soon. Just want to see how this works.

alternative to dell

So, seeing as how it's been three years since my last machine, I'm in the market for a new one. Last time I bought one, I just said screw it and went with Dell, because I don't enjoy the process of buying parts and building my own anymore.

But looking at the Dell site, the machine I want now will run me damn near 2k. So I was wondering if you guys know of and/or use any shops for building new machines that will do a full build including OS installation, and do it well. 2k is more than a decent gaming machine should cost.

Any recommendations?

WWII propaganda cartoons

Years ago, I got to watch part of a DVD that had this marvelous collection of all the cartoons they used to show soldiers during WWII.

They were fantastic, and mostly voiced by Mel Blanc, so you got to hear the voice of Bugs Bunny warning soldiers not to tell even their friends about military plans while vacationing at home, because Hitler is hiding under your kitchen table, listening.

There were cartoons made for enforcing certain behaviors during wartime, like not "goldbricking" (ie doing the bare minimum, or passing your work off to other soldiers), weapon maintenance, etc.

Point is, I want to watch this DVD again. I'm hunting around a bit on Netflix and Google, but I don't think it was called something easy to search for like "WWII propaganda cartoons", it probably had a quirky name.

If any of you have seen this DVD or know of it, let me know. I really want to see it all the way through.

andy milonakis

Do you guys remember that fat kid rapping who was big on the internet last year? You know, with his hit songs like "The Superbowl is Gay"? I freakin love that kid.

He's been given a show on MTV, which is awesome. I'm sure it will be cancelled in like a week, but you should check it out if you can. His humor isn't for everyone, it's just flat out absurd retardation mostly, but there's something about it that makes me laugh every time.

And no, I don't know when it's on... Tivo, sukkas. Look it up yourself.

http://www.mtv.com/onair/andy_milonakis/

Ooh, it's like a marathon or something. There's another one on now. Yeay!

Dammit. His theme song is in my head now.

"I rock peas on my head, but don't call me a pea head. Bees on my head, but don't call me a bee head. Bruce lee on my head, but don't call me a leehead..."

support good games

To echo a post made recently by my friend Adam Rixey, you have to support good games.

We're getting to the point where damn near every platform game is a shooter or a sports game, with a handful of "collect lots of coins" games thrown in. I made a post about this recently, the lack of good games in the last decade or so.

Well, there was a fantastic game that came out recently called Psychonauts, by Tim Schafer. This guy did Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, and Secret of Monkey Island. The man is my freaking hero, and everything he touches is gold. It's amazing. It's a romp through people's brains as a psychic cadet, with more creativity than I've seen in the last few years, by far. Every minute of it is amazingly fun and laugh out loud funny.

But it's not selling. You don't kill anyone, or score touchdowns. It's not the kind of game that sells well these days. It's not a sequel or a franchise. But if it doesn't sell, we're not going to get any more of them. They cancelled the sequel to Beyond Good and Evil because of lack of sales, and that was one of the only other games that showed any creativity at all in the last few years.

So I beg of you. Go buy this game. It's out on Xbox, Playstation, and PC. Just give it a shot. If you like it, tell your friends to buy it. Spread the word, like I'm trying to do. Doublefine is one of the last bastions of creative non-mainstream games left out there, and if they go out of business because of lack of sales, I'm going to start beating gamers over the head with heavy objects.

Please, give it a try. Support good games.

looking for new game ideas

Everything I've played in the last few months (since Psychonauts, which is an exception in every way, because it was fantastically perfect) has been crap. Utter crap.

So I've been looking at alternative gaming ideas that are sprouting up out there.

I'd give my left arm for another Majestic, which was an EA experiment a few years ago that I've ranted about before, cancelled because not enough people played it. It was an immersive paranoid environment with puzzle solving, where the game literally stalked you. You'd get calls on your cell phone, AIM messages, emails... I've never seen anything like it since. If any of you have seen anything like this out there in the world, please let me know.

Many people were scared off by the premise, but I fell completely in love. If you've seen the movie The Game, that's what it felt like. I love the invasion of privacy aspect of a game that won't be restrained to a program you can open and close. I'd get a phone call at work from a girl screaming that men in black were knocking her door down. It had its faults, but by god, that was innovative.

There's a clever looking game that I'm downloading now called Facade, where you interact in an open format with some AI that will probably be about as intelligent as Eliza, but hey, it looks interesting. It's a first person perspective "one act interactive drama". From their website:

"You, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage." We'll see how it goes, I just want to see how it functions, and what the other characters feel like when I interact with them.

http://www.download.com/Facade/3000-7508_4-10414038.html?tag=lst-0-1

The state of gaming is a bit sad, because certain formulas are being followed. If you're on a PC, the game is an FPS or MMORPG. If you're on a console the game is car racing, FPS, GTA-style whoring and car stealing, or collecting gems. That's pretty much the whole gaming world.

I'm looking for eye-opening innovation in games. I'm looking for something that makes me think a bit, or surprises me. If you've seen anything out there I should be taking a look at, share it with me.

OMG SWEET TATTOO

" as the native people in the pacific northwest (and other places) used totem poles to tell stories and keep family chronologies, my design was intended to tell a history of some of the important games that influenced me and my family as i grew up."

What a sweet idea. Mikey already does something like this, but the way it's organized to mimic an actual cultural icon is really nice.

Here's the page for it:

http://www.rhythm.com/~tonye/tattoo/

And here is the insanely cool tattoo:

fun with booze

Fear the drunken warriors.

Taken at Range's birthday party at St Stephen's Green.



Edit: made a local copy of the pic because the other one was unreliable.

feed my impatience

I don't understand why game companies don't get the appeal of impatience.

I'm a 20-something who loves video games. I can afford to buy them, but I'm incredibly impatient.

I'm sitting here wanting to play a video game. I look around online and find one that I would like to play. It's 1am, and no stores are open. I go to the website of the game company, and I go to amazon.com. Both offer to sell me the game via snail mail.

I could do that, and wait five days for it to arrive. Or I could take time out of my busy day tomorrow and go to a game store, pay more for the game, plus tax.

Or I can go on bittorrent and get the game in two hours.

Which do you think I choose?

I admit that this is a morally weak position, because I don't like the idea of theft, and I do it less as I get older, I make it a point to actually purchase things I enjoy. But in the heat of the moment, I still will often choose the quickest answer, moral or not.

My point is that if the game companies allowed me to purchase and download their games at the click of a button, I'd do it. I'm begging you people, make it easier for me to give you my money and get your products, and I'll do it. Amazon could allow us to download games, it's not like it's even terribly technically difficult. They could set up their own bittorrent-like server farms and have us share the bandwidth between each other.

I've been expecting this revolution in digital purchasing for years now, and it's not materialized. Hurry up already.