Ho Missiles and Light Saber Dicks

I would do unspeakable things for this game.

Cave Story Vs. Klaus Nomi!

You remember going to the KFC as a kid and filling your cup up with every flavor of soda and it tasting awful? That's kind of what happens any time there is ever a cross-over.

I can't believe I spent so much time on this.

Almost there...

When I started this project, it seemed completely r-word-ed as f-word, but now it's really coming together!

I still have my reservations that anybody will want to get this, though...

Coming Soon: The Crossover NOBODY asked for!

1 year with the Chumby. Verdict: Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

I remember telling one of my coworkers about the Chumby for the first time:

"Dude, did I tell you I've got a Chumby?"

"A what?"

"You know, Chumby? Bean bag looking thing?"

He stared at me.

"Runs Linux?"

"That's fucking weird man. Don't talk about your chubby anymore."

Unfortunate name or not, Chumby does what its supposed to do and more, and I really have only a few complaints about it after a year of ownership, so I'll get those out of the way. The touch screen is not so great. You can poke it and it usually does what it is supposed to, but you're not going to be enjoying touchscreen games on this little device (though accelerometer games work great). It sometimes flakes out and requires a restart. This is very un-Linuxy and very disappointing. Finally, text entry is terrible (ties back to the "poking" problem above).

So what does it do well? I know this sounds weird, but for an alarm-clock-radio replacement with an Internet connection, this thing is deluxe. The way you can program alarms for different days well in advance is the Chumby's killer app, as far as I am concerned. The alarm feature couldn't really be any better, and its just awesome that you play any kind of digital audio you can think of (Internet radio, MP3s, iPod, and more!).

The Chumby's ability to dish out the Internet in bite-sized chunks is also nice. The Google News app works well, I like the Rotten Tomatoes widget the most since it can tell me about new movies right away, and the Flickr widget gives me something to look at in the morning when I'm trying to motivate myself to roll out of bed. It's also nice for when I'm going to sleep to listen to Soma.FM at a very low volume instead of having a laptop or some other wasteful device piping out music.

The hardware is also damn cool. I wish my laptop was covered in semi-plush pleather and had big spongey buttons and controls to do stupid things (not text entry--stupid things). The fact this thing is fully hackable immediately gives it a much longer service life than iPods even have, and I can see the community carrying this device on for many years to come.

Heck, I even like the menu. The menu, as the story goes, was designed by one of the UI folks who worked on one of Apple's System 7, and it does show. The buttons are intuitive and I never raised an eyebrow at the placement of any options (other than the button to open up SSH and other hacking features, but this makes sense from a consumer-protection standpoint).

Finally, above all the sunshine I've blown into the ass of my alarm clock, this is a device that gets better with age while not having to invest another dime in it. Smart phones have app stores and service contracts that cost lots of money while the Chumby continues to sit and be awesome.

Don't let the fact that this computer-clock-Internet-thing comes in a miniature laundry bag (which I still use to this day... most eco-friendly packaging ever) sway you. If you are thinking this would be a cool device to replace your alarm clock or want to give it as a gift, then do it. They are currently on sale with a $40 off coupon, bringing the price down to $169.99 with free shipping.

Link.

I always wondered what would happen...

Somebody did it.

A friend and I always wondered what would happen if we rigged up one of those dumb flare guns from Wal-Mart with some fishing line and then pull the trigger from a distance loaded with bird shot. Apparently the little flare gun blows up!

Thanks Firearms Blog!

YAAAAGGGGHHHHH!

Thank you Boing Boing!

Spaceman

About that Bubblin' Crude...

...came from the back of somebody's head.

Why YouTube exists: Let's Play Barbie and the Magical Pegasus--Wisdom Teeth edition!

YES!

COLON MEDIC promotes COLON HEALTH!

This picture is based off of the name of the sender in a bit of spam a coworker received. The ribbon looks kind of fucked up, but I really dig the look.

(Yeah, I kinda ripped his style off a bit from Cave Story.)

I'LL BE BACK! LAAAAYYYY-TEEEEERRRRRR!

In other news...

Somebody made GI Joe very dirty.

Took 'em long enough

No More Heroes will still be the game to go down in Wii history as the first "Wii-jerk" game.

Thanks, Crunchgear!

Bo-wo-wo-wo-wo-wo-wa

I'll take double the BRAAAAAINS please.

My Internet Wife.

I don't usually doodle on paper since my hand is so unsteady. I use control-z at least as often as a mouse or stylus when drawing. Not having that option makes drawing seem a heck of a lot harder.

The joke (if you wanna call it that) comes from me insisting I have a wife on the Internet. She came to life on my notebook during a discussion in class that ended with a girl (who was neither my offline nor online wife) standing up and proclaiming, "you're all a bunch'a subjectivists!" and then slammed the door on her way out. It was amazing! I wanted to equate it with a big pile of M&Ms everyone was eating and one person saying, "you're all so selfish, give me the M&Ms!" but don't think it translates 100%.

That's Dirty!

Thank you bOING bOING!

Sea Monster

I remember seeing a whale for the first time. All I saw was huge, coming out of the water, shooting more water in the air, and then back down. I can see why sailors used to think they resembled the thing I drew here.

Trip Down Memory Lane: Police Quest: SWAT

You probably don't remember this game unless you played a lot of PC games through the nineties. In fact, even if you did, you probably don't remember this game since it was basically a flop for Sierra who was essentially the Valve of the time (never mind Valve being a part of Sierra for the production of Half-Life 1). And being the Valve of the time meant remaking their best-selling titles over and over again. Valve makes a game about a scientist in a powersuit beating the snot out of aliens and Sierra made games about a king that had to save his kingdom from a wizard. A lesser known series of Sierra was Police Quest, a game about a policeman trying to save his city from a rapist. SWAT was the last game of the Police Quest series and also the most infuriating.

In this game, you're a guy who shoots paper targets over and over again until a flashing klaxon on the screen tells you you need to stop shooting at paper targets and go shoot an old lady or talk her out of her house. If the old lady shot you or herself, you had to go back to shooting paper targets until you were alive again or she came back to life as an old woman that refused negotiations to stop locking herself in her bathroom.


As you can tell the original charm in Police Quest is gone. What they replaced it with were live action actors running around on the screen and you were either supposed to talk to them or shoot them. To talk to them, you had to go through two menus to say something (as they are holding a gun to their own temple) or pull out your gun and shoot them (only one menu, I believe). And, if the old lady, fugitive, or terrorists shot you, you had to sit through the first few bars of Amazing Grace and watch yourself get buried. While this was deep and heartfelt the first time, the thirtieth time I had to wait for my Pentium I to cue up that god forsaken FMV... And, for the later missions, failure meant swapping one of the four CDs back for the first one (which was heavily scratched by my nine-year-old hands) to shoot some paper targets again.

I keep mentioning these paper targets, but one has to realize this was a very early attempt at shoveling game-play-lengthening material into a game so Sierra could hit their 20 hour mark or whatever was in vogue at the time. At least most tedious tasks in a game attempt to give you some reward or skill that is useful later in the game, but nooooope. In this game, all you were supposed to do was talk suspects out of killing themselves or shoot fast moving targets that shoot back with inhuman accuracy. Unfortunately, the paper targets neither moved quick nor were they talkative.

Now I know this was an early attempt to be a realistic simulation for being a SWAT officer, and for the effort, it at least deserves recognition, but if you're going to make a game into an occupational simulator, why not have Plumber's Quest: Roto-Rooter, where you have to spend hours at a time trying to figure out how to order things out of the McMaster-Carr catalog, or you could remake Leisure Suit Larry, but call the game "Leisure Suit Larry: Date Rapist" where you have to spend hours at a time calling up doctors to get prescriptions for rophynol until you strike poontang gold and have to run to your nearest singles bar to get a date? Or, here's another idea, "Blogger's Quest: Run-on Sentence!"

I got a Wacom Bamboo!

Been a while.

I picked up a Wacom Bamboo. It really does perform rather well under Ubuntu 8.10, even if the function keys and scroll wheel don't work out of the box (mostly impossible for me to configure at this point since I need to hot swap my tablet and xorg doesn't like hot swapping). Having only used this tablet a bit, it seems like it is not as well suited as the mouse and keyboard for most tasks (i.e. the pen tool, boxes, ovals, and text), but DAMMIT it is awesome with the caligraphy tool. The above drawing took only a few minutes, and didn't turn out bad at all for a first attempt with the caligraphy tool to produce a complete drawing.