A Hive Mind of One

3:53pm: Chronotron!
Hey, I just remembered I have a livejournal!

Dear Livejournal, this year I made an Indie Web Game and made a reasonable amount of money from it. I also bought a house. I live in a house now that I bought.

The game is called Chronotron and it is about a time traveling robot. It uses time travel and causality paradoxes are game mechanics, and it is super fun.

You can play it all over the internet, but the people that paid me the most money to sponsor it was Kongregate.

Play Chronotron Here!

Game related news is available at my new site, Scarybug Games


Chronotron won a spot in the PAX 10, which means I'm going to Seattle at the end of August to demo it, and talk to video game people who will probably offer me jobs I can't take because I just bought a house in WI.

11:50am: Biota.org interview
I was interviewed by Tom Barbalet of Biota.org about Trilobots, Biots, ALife development, and integrating ALife and games. Let me know what you think. I'm probably not going to be able to listen to it myself because I'd cringe the whole way through over my speaking voice and rambling responses.

6:01pm: I am now even more Nerdcore
Over on the Allfather of Nerdcore Hip-Hop's website you will see a little flash music player: lovingly forged from the finest ascii-source in the forge of the very laptop that sits before me as I write.

10:18am: Cryptonomicon reference in today's xkcd
http://xkcd.com/c292.html, in the rollover text.

I found this amusing because I have used "dengo" as a label for goto. Also "hell".

11:24am: America is Over
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/appeals-court-t.html

Forgetting the blatantly illegal wiretapping U.S. citizens without a warrant thing, the real problem here is the fact that the case was thrown out because civil liberties groups don't have the right to sue the government over the wiretaps because they couldn't prove they were spied on.

Goodbye right to petition the government for a redress of grievances!

This is pretty much the same (non) ruling the Supreme Court gave the FFRF. Forget that the executive branch is using our tax money to break the law and violate the constitution. Oversight is over. The president is king.

10:47am: I saw Weird Al at Summerfest Tuesday night, despite having vowed two years ago to never return to Summerfest. It rained on us the whole time, and I was too far back to see really well, but the show was awesome. The crowd could have been a little more polite. When the video stopped working during a costume change, the crowd started chanting "we want Al" which is pretty stupid because he obviously schedules those video breaks so he can change costume/props/instruments/etc. But then the band came on and played "Technical Difficulties" (er, jammed, while chanting "technical difficulties" occasionally) And then Al came back on and the video got fixed.

He played "Close To You" and "Albuquerque" as an encore, so obviously the crowd was polite enough for that much.
He did a lot of his older songs in medley format, squeezing in more content without belaboring the music was an interesting choice that works really well for his repertoire. He also did a "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" parody about why we should care about Paris Hilton, and played a lot of "Al TV" videos, the best of which was his "You are the worst thing to happen to America ever" rant to Kevin Fedderline. Yay!

Most surprising thing: Lots of females in attendance, many of whom sang along during the Star Wars songs.

9:41am: Supreme Court spends yesterday ruining America
http://ffrf.org/news/2007/heinvFFRF.php

Taxpayers can't sue the executive when it uses taxpayer money to promote religion. For those playing at home, it means that nobody can. It's also likely that this means that the supreme court is stacked in such a way as to remove most judicial oversight over the executive.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0626/p01s01-uspo.html

McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform violates free speech somehow.

"Discussion of issues cannot be suppressed simply because the issues may also be pertinent in an election," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor."

That's funny, because the law doesn't say you can't discuss the issues, it says you have to disclose who payed to discuss the issues.

But wait...

http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=63246

The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 against Joseph Frederick, a former high school student from Juneau who unfurled a homemade "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner during the Olympic torch run through the city, on its way to Salt Lake City.

Didn't Roberts just say that the tie goes to the speaker in a 1st amendment case? Oh, not if the the person's speech is promoting something illegal! That makes perfect sense.

Justice Roberts: "The message on Frederick's banner is cryptic," adding that the suspending principal "thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one."

2:13pm: Portfolioioioioio
I finally got around to updating my portfolio to include the game I made for Miller Brewing.

8:32pm:

4:28pm: Artificial Unlife?

I finally got around to listening to the Biota.org podcasts, which reminded me that I wanted to add zombies to biots. Actually, playing Urban Dead, and adding both ALife characters and Undead to the Nerdcore Card Game rules also may have had something to do with it.

Zombies can't have babies, but they can inject their (often mutated) programming into another biot just by biting it!

Zombies can be added via the ridiculously long menu, or by waiting for a special mutant fungus to appear and then wating for a biot to eat it.

Here are the sprites I made for the zombies. Spooky!

Grar!

By the way, if Brian ever gets around to setting up my wiki space, I'm going to start putting the Nerdcore Card Game rules online. I'd also like to put up a Biots wiki.

2:31pm: The High Noon Saloon ripped me off!
Do me a favor? Go pick up the Madison edition of this weeks "The Onion"

Turn to page 45.

Reel in horror as a High Noon Saloon ad totally rips off a comic I wrote two years ago!

9:21pm: Scientists Discover the One True Faith
The worlds oldest religion has to be the correct one, right? Forget the Yahweh-Come-Latlies. It's Giant Stone Snake worship from here on out!

5:45pm: Nerdcore featured on Drunk Duck!
I was just thinking "Wow, Drunk Duck's been featuring all the comics I read lately."

Let me have my small victories.

12:56pm: Oh hell yeah!
Cyborg time go!

11:15am: Quack Zine Interview
I was interviewed by The Quack Zine about Nerdcore. There ya go.

4:12pm: Scarybug.org Overhaul
I've updated scarybug.org for the first time since before I graduated college!! Some of those links were even pointing to broken stuff that used to be on my uwm account.

I still need to edit some text and play with the css and images, but the links are there. The site is now pretty much just a portfolio of all the stuff I've done. The only really new thing up there is that now you can play my Interactive Fiction game ONLINE!

And for those of you not on the table list, you can see a couple of the educational flash games I've been making at work. Huzzah!

Also, I've started mirroring Nerdcore at Drunk Duck. It's like Nerdcore in syndicated reruns! Season one was so craaaaaazy! Drop by and leave a comment if you feel so inclined.

10:23am: Burnie Animation
Part of a project I'm working on. In this animation, Burnie's head, hands, hand motions, mouth, eyes, and eyebrows are each animated independently. each component randomly picks its animation.

11:37am: Hear ye!
piratejesus is going to stop being where I put site updates for my webcomics. Now you can subscribe to nerdcore_rss instead!

Why haven't I been blogging here? I'm sort of moving over to blogging at Table Naked, which is a little home-brewed blog/wiki/album site we've been cooking up. Mostly thanks to Brian. My new blog is Scarybug's Adventures

I got a new job! I'm now a Multimedia Developer for a small Madison-based company, which means I program flash games and various other things for education and job training. It is so much cooler than being a Business Analyst for a huge corporation owned by Ross Perot.

Also, I guess back in January I was interviewed by Tom Barbalet of Biota.org about my ALife project, Biots. You can read the interview Here.

9:27pm: News crossposted from my comic's blog
I'm a published artist! Atlas Games recently announced that the second edition of Let's Kill, the card game of happy-homicidal fun created by Sancho Games has shipped to stores! Let's Kill features all kinds of gruesome stick-figure art by yours truly. "Joe the Web Cartoonist" is even a victim in the game! Of course, if you go over to the Atlas site, you can get a PDF that you can print out to make your own victims, you can also download the rules to get a taste of the game. Ask for Let's Kill at your local gaming store, or, if you don't have a local gaming store, you can buy it from Warehouse 23.

Warning! The cards are made with voodoo, so you're actually really killing people when you play!

In other bizzare news, a friend of mine was nominated for a Spike TV Videogame Award for his work at Slashdot Games, despite his utter contempt for the Spike TV Videogame Awards.

Last weekend I did a corn maze. (The Indians call them Maize Mazes)

There are new Holy desktop backgrounds for voting on Top Web Comics and Web Comics List.

12:24pm: Fan fiction.
Harry Potter and the Difference Between Alternating Current and Direct Current

7:37pm: New Orleans
The following is an email I sent to the table list on Wed, 31 Aug 2005. I'm just recording it here for posterity. Obviously, more events have occured since then, and more information has come out.

People have been saying for a long time that you
should make sure you vist New Orleans while you still
can. It looks like time is up. The Hurricane didn't do
worst-case senario damage to the city, but the levies
broke and New Orleans is now mostly under water, and
the mayor has declared the city off-limits for at
least two months.

Watch for Jon Stewart once again yelling at people for
saying this and that is a "miracle", when a miracle is
an "act of god" and that a more accurate term for the
fact that this and that famous person survived is
"oversight". Of course, we don't have a death toll
right now because we're still rescuing the survivors.

A couple points I'd like to make that seem to be kind
of under-reported as I poke through google news.

The NY times said that many people chose not to
evacuate before the storm. They failed to point out
that New Orleans has an extremely high poverty rate,
and that many people could not find the means to
evacuate on their own.

Stoughton can pretty much kiss FEMA money goodbye. No
one's going to pay attention to tornado damage
anymore.

N.O. had it's flood prevention budget cut by the Bush
Admin. in order to pay for Iraq, there are also fewer
Natl. Guard to help out right now because of the war.

Scientists not funded by Exxon-Mobile are saying that
tropical storms and hurricanes are only going to get
worse because of global warming. The 1 degree every
100 years thing that libertarians like to point out
may not sound like much, but there you go.

The National weather service, prior to Hurricane
Katrina issued statements stressing how devastating
this would be. Perhaps they did this because the 24hr
news channels have been trumping up every single storm
they can get their hands on because it's exciting
news.
(For those of you who saw the Daily Show mocking the
faux drama stirred up by CNN, Fox, etc over the last
tropical storm) I think NWS wanted to point out that
this is the real deal.

People knew that this was coming. I'm sure the local
govt had some plans for evacuating the city, but it
really would have been better for them to have a plan
to get everyone out, instead of carting the poor into
a stadium that is now flooded.

7:34pm: I am bad at livejournal
I was looking at my entries and noticed I mentioned the EDS interview, but didn't mention that I got the job!

I guess having a job makes it harder to 'blog, especially if you're still doing a weekly webcomic.

7:31pm: Comics really were better back then.
Let's see, what would be a funny plot for a Mickey Mouse comic strip?

I know! How about Mickey attempts suicide!

(via muskrat_john)

11:35pm: Yesterday
The Gothsicles kicked four entire asses at Reverence last night! Some corpses even rose from the dead to see the show. More people need to incorporate Flash animation and live music.

Before that I filled out lots of paperwork for my new job and had my pee tested for drugs. I am now going to imagine that the procedure for testing urine for drugs involves sipping...

Okay that was gross.

5:22pm: I Wish I'd Thought of it First

From Toothpaste for Dinner