A Series of Tubes

There is something wrong with Garfield comics that makes them simply unfunny. Well someone figured it out and fixed the problem. I’ll demonstrate this solution below. Take the following comic:

So the premise is that John looks crazy and Garfield is venturing a guess. The problem here is that Garfield’s guess is just simply not funny. The problem with Garfield the comic strip is that it contains Garfield the cat. The solution then….photoshop out the problem:

Now the reader is put in place of garfield and the range of hilarious possibilities makes this comedic genius. Another example Read more

As part of the tree sit at UCSC, some of the protesters were there in opposition to the use of animals in research.  You can see one of the fliers from their website:

I do not agree that animal research should be stopped and the reason is that there is an increase in knowledge and well being that can be obtained through animal research.  Unethical animal experiments should be stopped and there should be safe regulations to enforce them.  I’m all for openness of what is happening in labs and rational debate.  Animal rights activists in the Santa Cruz area crossed the line between non violent protests and assault, intimidation, and trespassing. Read more

There is an interesting article at the Wall Street Journal about Mormonism. It basically talks about how Mitt Romney’s presidential bid created a resurgent interest in Mormonism and how most of that interest was not of the positive variety. Here is a graphic from the article that highlights that sentiment:

I had read up on Mormonism a while back and this article made me curious about something. Read more

In an effort to comment on gamespot’s coverage of the GDC, or lack of coverage with regards to independent games, I created a gamespot login. Apparently in order to actually comment on their website you have to have been a member of their website for at least 3 days or so before you can post in certain places or change your picture or do anything that you would automatically be able to do on a normal website. It is a huge pain.

As you can see I am a rank 2 gamespotter which means that I can browse the website with about as much authority as if I randomly came across the site on the web. I have the title of journeyman because I am currently on a painful journey to be able to post on a website. Eventually I could achieve the rank of “captain able to post stuff” or perhaps “sergeant can now change the picture next to my name”.

I was trying to comment on one of the few articles that I could find about the IGF at the GDC: link to the article here.

So the guy behind world of goo made a different game, one about robots, in 7 days. What is impressive to me is the artistic nature of the game and how fun and addictive the gameplay is. The first time I played I didn’t realize that I could buy more than 1 robot and that I had to hover over the hearts that drop. I guessI should have read the instructions in the background. Have a go at the robot game (it’s flash so you can play in your browser). Just click the image below.

Since it is an unfinished idea, I think demonstrates really great artistic talent and great game design right off the bat. This sort of thing makes me glad that I got World of Goo.

So I went to the GDC with a free pass. There were demos and things to see from the major studios, but the most exciting thing to see were some of the really cool independent games. There were two games that caught my eye, both of them had really cool game art, music, and sound. Since they are independent games it is hard to make a really large and impressive 3d world. Because of this the best indie games were of the 2d variety.

The first game I’ll mention is Iron dukes which is a game about pirates. From this initial description this game is already awesome. It runs on flash and actually requires you to be running a relatively new computer for it to not slow down to a crawl. Since you can run the game in a web browser, if you wanted to, you yourself could go check it out for free. Below is the picture of my crew during one of the games:

Another really cool game was world of goo. You basically use the goo to construct bridges and structures in order to get to your objective. If you preoder the game for $20 you can get the preview/demo right now while the game finishes development. The goo has a personality and you sort of think of them as you minions.

I should also mention that there was a game in the theme of guitar hero and rock band called guitar rising. Basically in both guitar hero and rock band you get really good at playing a plastic guitar. In guitar rising you learn how to play an actual guitar in a very similar format to guitar hero and rock band. It was pretty cool but also needed some development time (their website says that the release date is late 2008). You of course need a guitar to play the game.

I’m addicted to watching the TED talks on google video or youtube. This is just one of the cool talks that they have about a guy making walking machines out of what looks like PVC or bamboo:

You can take a look at more of the TED talks here