Under the Fuzzy Green Hat

July 6th, 2010

INT. A BIG CORPORATE BOARDROOM - LATE NIGHT

Haggard-looking men in suits sit around a big table. Their ties are loose, their sleeves rolled up. A whiteboard on the wall is covered with words, ideas -- all crossed out. Scrunched-up pieces of paper litter the room. A pile of empty, used pizza boxes sits in the middle of the table. STEVE, 34, sits at the head of the table.

            STEVE

People, people. We all want to go
home. We're all tired. But we **need**
to figure this out. We're so close. John,
go over what we have so far.

JOHN, 32, stands up and reads from a sheet of paper.

            JOHN

We have an idea for a product centered
around drinking. We know it's got to
have shot glasses. We know it's got to
be a great party-starter --

            RICHARD
            (excitedly)

WE SHOULD PUT THAT ON THE BOX!

            JOHN

Shut up, Richard. Research suggests that
the product should be a game, since people
like games.

John sits down.

Read the rest here. Scott is an awesome guy, and (though I wish it were otherwise) FUNNIER than ME!

Reblogged from I Can't Control My Brain

July 4th, 2010

Zoom

60 X-Over 20

July 1st, 2010

QA testing a recent build by the overseas outsourced development team.

Evidence would suggest that Australians don’t even have retinas.

“Blob of grey looks as intended. Marked WONTFIX, ticket closed.”

June 29th, 2010

Zoom

Somewhere

June 29th, 2010

Zoom

Ideas in Motion

June 28th, 2010

Zoom

Scott Jackson:

twitter-crushes on GitHub (.zip download)

Tumblr has a thing called “Crushes” that shows you whose posts you’ve Liked the most. I made a little thing like that for Twitter to show you whose twitters you’ve Favorited the most. You run it from the command-line, à la Van Hœt. If you want to find out who you favr the most on Twitter, try it out. You don’t need to give it your Twitter password or anything.

My favourite part of this is that each little bar looks like an awkward, unhideable Twitter boner.

Oh and also something something cool analytics deep look into human psyche brave new world.

Reblogged from I Can't Control My Brain

June 28th, 2010

Zoom

Wow.

So, after playing through some of my old Infocom text adventure games, I decided to search online to see how one would go about making one in this day and age.

It turns out: stupefyingly easy. Apparently, back in the old days, it was actually something hard that required some programming know-how, but in the past couple of years, writing interactive fiction has become as easy as (if not easier than) writing a book.

I don’t know what magic went into making the compiler understand natural language and turn it into sweet games, but anything that removes barriers between great ideas and great execution is fine by me.

So, yeah. I’m going to start writing some interactive fiction now. I don’t know when I’ll be done, or when I’ll know what exactly the finished product will look like, but I do invite you to join along for the ride. The tool/language/system is called Inform, and you can learn more about it here.

Make something cool.

Wow.

So, after playing through some of my old Infocom text adventure games, I decided to search online to see how one would go about making one in this day and age.

It turns out: stupefyingly easy. Apparently, back in the old days, it was actually something hard that required some programming know-how, but in the past couple of years, writing interactive fiction has become as easy as (if not easier than) writing a book.

I don’t know what magic went into making the compiler understand natural language and turn it into sweet games, but anything that removes barriers between great ideas and great execution is fine by me.

So, yeah. I’m going to start writing some interactive fiction now. I don’t know when I’ll be done, or when I’ll know what exactly the finished product will look like, but I do invite you to join along for the ride. The tool/language/system is called Inform, and you can learn more about it here.

Make something cool.

June 28th, 2010

Insecurities

Me:	look, he's got my wanton disregard for haircuts, and your scraggly half-beard!
Ryan:	I have a full beard
Ryan:	Which I'm going to shave, I think
Me:	"full beard"
Me:	"shave"
Ryan:	THREE QUARTERS
Me:	fine. three quarters. no wonder you don't have a girlfriend
Me:	nobody would ever date a man so insecure about his beard
Ryan:	SHUT UP

June 27th, 2010

Zoom

Ahem.

I believe it’s called the World Championships, anyone is allowed to win (not just Brazil), players tend to actually score goals in hockey, and there are less annoying vuvuzelas and more awesome green men in our noble sport.

Just an FYI. You know. If that’s all right with you. Eh.

June 26th, 2010

Zoom