The Megas are, of course, not to be confused with THE PROTOMEN, who do rather dark prog-rockish songs incorporating Mega Man themes in addition to having amazing artistic design.
They are also not to be confused with The Minibosses, who do an excellent medley of the Mega Man 2 soundtrack, as well as great rock covers of other video game music.
Just thought I'd straighten that out. :)
So now the site is actually opened up. :-/
Even as it loads, the game is designed to throw you off. It's like a 11 year old girl's wildest fantasy as illustrated by Lisa Frank. There are butterflies, brilliant sparkles, rainbows, and a silhouette of the titular unicorn. A simple synthy tune plays. It's seven shades of highly saturated vomit-inducing gaiety.
The game starts off with minimal instruction. Press Z for double jump, X for dash, and the more spiritual instruction "Press Z to make your wishes come true." When you press Z, you are presented with a silver unicorn with a flowing rainbow mane and tail galloping across a grassy platform. "Always" by Erasure plays. But don't bail out now, this is where it gets good.
The game is definetly a twitch game — that is, it relies solely on reflexes — but it gently eases you in to things. The first jump is really a drop that needs no input, and you are set to collide with the first floating fairy bonus. In this first five seconds, the game demonstrates two game mechanics. And in another five seconds, you've already cleared some easy jumps and collected a few fairies. Just like that, you're playing the game. No tutorial or boring demonstration.
Soon, the game throws in another obstacle, the star. The star must be dashed through in a blaze of rainbow glory. It gets your attention by sparkling as it enters the playfield, and the game displays in large letters "DASH (X)!!!" thus acquainting you with the third and final game mechanic. You dash through the star, and it explodes in a gratuitous pixelated fireball. That's it. Jump, dash, enjoy.
Another sign of good game design is that the controls feel natural. When it's fun just to jump, you've done it right. The exploding stars are also immensely satisfying, and it's even fun to die. Upon impact with a wall or the unseen chasms below, the robot unicorn explodes in a cascade of pixelated fireballs, and the severed head flies toward the screen. The retry screen shows the decapitated unicorn crying as the timer counts down to try again.
It's so brilliantly simple and fun. It really shows what a bunch of master trolls the Adult Swim folks are, creating a game with such schlocky pretense but such satisfying gameplay. Keep it up, guys. :)
Furthermore, saying that "network sites work" is a little disingenuous. It implies that they enable communication where the reality is that they merely facilitate it. I hear all of the important things that goes on with my friends and family even without Facebook because they care enough to tell me about it (and I'm quite happy to not hear about the unimportant stuff). People will communicate as long as there is some way that they can. Facebook is the mode du jour; something will undoubtedly take its place in the future.
So if the communication and the service aren't necessarily related, why can't I just make my own? Would any of you read it? I mean that question seriously. I could clone any "social media" platform in about a day and broadcast my thoughts and actions just like they do on Twitter or Facebook — but do any of you want to read it?
Part of the problem with this idea might be simply because it won't show up in a facebook feed (or will it? Anyone know how FB integrates RSS feeds?). And I can't get to anyone's status feeds, either. That's the real rub: if I don't want to join Facebook, it's pretty much closed off to me. In an open web, Facebook has created a walled garden. It's — dare I say it? — anti-social.
So the moral of the story is: I don't need to get on Facebook because it's superfluous, and you don't need to quit Facebook unless you care about data privacy and openness. Have a nice day. :)
I don't normally embed flash junk in my blog, but Grooveshark is totally cool and this really is the easiest way to share this idea — a musical cross-section of the 90's that affected me very personally growing up.
I've deliberately chosen some songs that I liked better than a particular artists' greatest hit. "Zero" by Smashing Pumpkins, for example, is less well known than "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," but I think it's a better song. I've also deliberately left out Nirvana because that's the first thing everyone thinks of when you say "90's alternative." If there's an artist you think should be on this list, let me know. If you were about to suggest Dave Matthews Band, please exit your browser now.
Enjoy!
I wouldn't normally broadcast this sort of thing, but it's pretty much the only way some of you will find out. (Hi, Chrissy!) I have a date this evening with a very cool lady. I met her on OKCupid, she is human (or at least a reasonable facsimile), and that's all the information I'm willing to divulge at this time.
G'night, friends.
The kids are right, though. I really don't get social networking. In my mind, social networking is:
Ordinarily I've ranted about the first two points — privacy and information overload — but I'd like to change pace and discuss the last point. Social networking is changing the way we communicate, and it's not all for the better.
Unless you're rich and famous, communcation has traditionally been a point-to-point affair. You send a friend a letter, talk on the phone, or chat in person. There is a single sender, and a single receiver. The advent of blogs and sites like twitter, however, have brought multicast to the masses. Now everyone can say something to lots of people; indeed a single person can address everyone, though it's unlikely that everyone will listen. This is, of course, extremely liberating. Now you can have the same broadcast power as Michael Ian Black, though let's face it, you're not as funny as he is and your twitter page doesn't look as cool, either. For the record, I'm confident that the previous sentence will remain true for anyone that reads my blog, now or in the future.
On the other hand, the "status update" is a very impersonal method of communication. Sure, people talk to each other on twitter, but as an outside observer, I have no idea what they're talking about (Twitter lacks threading or even an effective method to refer to other posts, but that's another rant). When talking to everyone, you're not really talking to anyone.
The problem is that it's passive. Where one-to-one communication brings people closer together, passive broadcast communication like this distances people. It puts a computer in the middle, mediating the exchange and raising the barrier to actual conversation. Much like leaving notes on the refrigerator, there's no real engagement — it's just data transfer.
Of course, as my good friend James pointed out, this isn't really a problem with social networking sites. Facebook, for example, offers personal messaging in addition to broadcast updates. The real problem is that people just don't seem to be interested in actual discussion anymore. This is probably partly due to a lack of time — twitter offers a bite-sized information digest that makes you feel like you're actually staying up-to-date. There is also laziness as well — some people just don't want to bother connecting on a personal level. And I'm sure plain old vanity plays a part in keeping people spewing banalities across the interwebs.
So the moral is, you guys suck. :-P If the only thing you've told your friends today is a "god i love daves taco shack," then you can do better. Stop squandering the power of the internet on this kind of detritus.
Darn kids.
In the pursuit pure simplicity, I have changed the header to a single strip. It's not semi-transparent, and it doesn't stay put when the page scrolls. I trust that if you want to get to the header, you can engage the appropriate means (be it the Home key, a finger swipe, or an IBM Scrollpoint without the appropriate software installed). The header also now indicates where you are by simply adding that URL bit to the site title.
The part of the header that navigated to different parts of the site has been moved into a menu that pops up when you click on the site name. This menu supports a quick search feature much like spotlight or the windows Vista/7 start menu. And if you're in a limited browser, clicking that link takes you back to the main page, where you get a menu of the site anyway. This menu can also be popped up by whacking the ` key. This also make it hard to type that key, but I'm going to take a cue from the experienced UI designers at Apple and Microsoft. I'm going to ignore the problem, and hope it goes away.
Those of you with masochistic fetishes take note: I have improved IE8 compatibility across the board. The quick menu was designed to work on it, and I've fixed auto layout switching (where the page seamlessly flows when it gets narrower than the normal 7.5" column) to work as well. Live preview works partially.
I've also created proper stylesheets for handheld and print media types. So if your cell phone browser actually acts like a mobile browser and not like a scaled-down desktop browser (as I've found some to act), you should see a much nicer looking version of my site on your phone. Likewise, the print media stylesheet cuts out the header and ensures a black on white color scheme for simple, clean output on the printed page.
Overall, I think it's a big improvement in usability and compatibility. And, of course, it still looks damn slick, too. :-P
[As an aside, I would also like to point out that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, observes that people aren't interested in privacy anymore, to which I have to reply, "Up yours, Mark!"]
Firstly, I've dumped Google Reader and switched back to Gregarius for RSS reading. Gregarius is more-or-less on par with Google Reader, except I can't share things with friends. It even has configurable keyboard navigation which is quite nice. Credit where it's due, Google Reader allowed me to dump my feeds as an OPML document which was easily imported into Gregarius, so the whole process took about 15 minutes.
I've used Google Docs as a simple, if limited, substitute for a proper word processor. Most notably, I used it to write my invoices. From now on, though, I'm going to be writing my documents in LyX, a wysiwyg LaTeX editor. Not only will I get control over my data, I'll have some of the most professional-looking invoices ever made.
I have a rather old and heavily used GMail account that I intend to migrate away from eventually, but I'm honestly pretty entrenched there. Even after I tell everyone a new address, I'll have to keep the account open just in case I get a mail from someone who didn't get the message. I have, however, set up a local search system for email (and even documents) that works quite well, so I won't have to use gmail for that. Friends, if you have bytex64@gmail.com in your address book, please change that to bytex64@bytex64.net.
And the biggest problem is, of course, web search. Google has had a stranglehold on web search for the past decade, and there really is no alternative that works as well as Google. There is Bing, and it's a pretty dire observation on how far Google has declined that I would even consider a Microsoft search engine with a silly name. There's also Yahoo, but in my experience it's just an inferior search engine. And truth told, they're all data mining my queries, so I may as well go with the best.
In other news, I'm experimenting with a new site design. I feel that the header of my site just has too much crap in it, and that it needs to be simplified. Take a look over at the beta site and see if you like it. In particular, try the menu that pops up when you click on the site name and see if it works for you. Yes, it's inspired by Vista/7's start menu. No, I'm not ashamed of stealing a good design.