Lololololollll

forgot about that censorship bar! took it down. Also added Amazon Associates thing. More MONETIZATION!!!

I live in Seattle now. And work for Amazon. Weeeeeeeeee!

I have some stuff up at Digital love child. It's about skullgirls. I like the game! I'm going to be doing more here.

workin on a game atm. cool concept, i think.

also, going through my steam library. more forthcoming.

Blogs of the Round Table: Being Other OR Identity Crisis

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

Whenever questions like this come up, I always think of two things.

First, I think of a girl I knew in high school, Angelica Hernandez. Smart girl, pretty, and an incredibly hard worker. We were both on the robotics team (Falcon Robotics Team 842, look it up) and the robotics team was hella in involved with the AZ immigration protests. And any talk of immigration in AZ inevitably turns to the hilarious amount of casual racism that permeate's this state.

So she tells me a story. She's talking around in a department store, shopping as teenage girls are wont to do; pick something up, carry it around, compare it, put it aside, etc etc. And after a while she realizes the security is following her around.

This blew my fucking mind. Angelica is the fucking model citizen. She's nice, she's smart, she's a hard worker, she's the FUCKING VALEDICTORIAN AND PRESIDENT OF AN INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED ROBOTICS CLUB. And she was followed around while shopping in a department store, a normal, American, and mildly boring thing.

Can you imagine that? Born and raised American, and being followed around while you did normal American shit*?

Second thought: Ya ever read Brave New World? Wonderful, naive, condescending, and visionary, all at once. One of the key 'things' about the book is the 'feelies' a rather wonderful opiate of the masses. While the exact mechanism of their operation is never quite explained** the effect of a feelie is allowing whomever views it to feel whatever the subject of the feelie is feeling. So, if a Savage was, say, lashing himself to avoid temptation, and someone was recording that for a feelie, the viewers of that feelie would feel the emotional and physical sensations of the Savage in question.

And hey, here comes the point!

When people bring up race and sex and gender in the context of videogames, and specifically the context of identification, I inevitably come back to Angelica's story, and specifically my reaction: "who would want to live like that?"

And now here's the point!

Anyone who would want to experience that type of shit is, in my eyes, sick. I understand living with it. I understand wanting to understand some small portion of it. I understand the desire to be empathetic to your fellow man. But to have the absurd conceit that you 'know what it's like', to take a whole promising artistic medium and to pigeon-hole it back into these old absurdities, to not let it breathe an explore it's own potential...god, how bizarre.

*unless you lived it, no you can't
**making it better than all modern sci-fi HIIIYOOOO!!!

HAHAHAHAHAAAA

Sometimes I forget why people hate programming.

Then I spend an hour fixing an xcode linker error that boils down to "XCODE DOESN'T LIKE C++ CODE THAT CALLS C CODE!" And of course, it doesn't listen to what I tell it to compile the code as, it listens to the file extension.

I spent an hour to figure out that I had to change main.cpp to main.c.

PROGRAMMING.

But WHY is LoL down?

Maaaaaan, how am I gonna farm LEAGUE GAME POINTS if the server is down? It's rather rude Riot games! Rather rude indeed.

Making a iOS game!

Getting in on dat APP STORE MONEY SON!!!

Inspired by Forget-Me-Not! http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/ios-game-review-forget-me-not/

but hopefully better, as I'm not that fond of that game honestly!

Using the Sparrow framework to do it!

Yeah!

GODLIKE!

A quick though on twitch.tv commercials...

THE GAMES YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!

STARFOX 64 3D! (port)
OCARINA OF TIME 3D! (port)
MARIOKART 7! (sequel)

Fucking videogames.

Ya know I never really thought much of 'scripting' languages...

until I came across Applescript. yeah, I got that they gave large amounts of power to the user (shoutouts to bash!) and yeah, lightweight, and yeah instant execution and all that. I just didn't think much until I had one in my hand that could actually do AWESOME SHIT. Like, now I have this application called Quicksilver, and I'm using it not only to open and close apps proper, but to run my applescripts, which open up random chrome tabs, reposition my windows how I like, open unread shit from my feeds, fuck even make new notes in evernote automatically! Godlike!

Shame so little Mac shit supports applescript :( I can really see how this crap could be used not only by programmers, but even people who don't know how to program, but want to do shit FASTER on their computers, or even learn a little bit about how they work