Hi Livejournal. I have a Twitter account. I'm more talkative over there, for whatever crazy reason.

I've had this post queued for like a year or something, because I always wanted to put more in it than just "HEY TWITTER". So, here's something: A game called VVVVVV was released yesterday, and it is phenomenal. Please go buy it, or at least play the demo.

VVVVVV was designed and written by one man, Terry Cavanaugh, over the course of about six months. (The music was done by SoulEye and is also tremendous.) Terry has previously released some great stuff for free, including Don't Look Back, Pathways, and, of course, Maverick Bus.

VVVVVV started its long gestation period as Sine Wave Ninja, which was made in two hours for the Klik of the Month Klub. (The Klik of the Month Klub, as you'll recall, is a monthly two-hour game jam that I host at my website, Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com. Anyone can make games in Klik & Play, so anyone can participate. Come make games with us!) It feels really cool to have had some hand, however slight, in the inspiration and development of such a great game.

I suppose my point is, I want to live in a world where people like Terry can produce excellent work and earn a living doing it. So give the VVVVVV demo a shot, and if you like what you see, give the man fifteen of your dollars. It's the most well-crafted and enjoyable game I've played in a long, long time.

Hey, is it normal to get random crazy bots IMing you the instant you make an LJ post?

Let's find out.

EDIT! Apparently, yes. For goddamn months. I happened to get two at once, though, so I'm guessing the people behind this bot aren't the same.

Removing my AIM from my profile now.

Hey, so I hacked a NES emulator for the Wii to play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out using the Gamecube bongos.

It works surprisingly well! Much better than the Power Glove ever did. If you have a Wii and a pair of Gamecube bongos, I highly recommend trying it out.

Here's an embarrassing YouTube video demonstration / infomercial:

Apparently when you have a baby you decide that the two funniest things in the world are putting random things into your mouth and making stupid faces.

[As an aside: iMovie is terrible. It's unbearably slow to do anything (clicking on the "capture from live camera" icon locks the program up for like five minutes before it even brings up the preview window, and then who knows how long it will take from the time you hit "record" to when it actually gets around to recording) and I could never get a proper preview with sound for some reason. So, yes, I know that the video would be a lot better with tighter editing; I just couldn't stand to work in that fucking program any longer.]

If you have any further ideas for NES games that could be played with bongos, I'm interested in hearing them.

1. Type your tracking number into this website. Copy the "Track this package via RSS" link into your clipboard.
   
2. Enter your IM screen name and paste the RSS link into the "Website" field on Feed Crier. Hit "Subscribe" and watch your madness (mostly) dissipate!

I'd still feel better if there was some way to get the GPS coordinates of the truck your package was on and I could have a little window on my screen at all times showing me exactly where my shiny new video card was, though.

Well, for some value of "better". I'd probably start getting urges to drive south to intercept the truck.

So, hey, I'll be playing Macavity in January. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. What the hell.

Something glorious and ludicrous is going down this weekend.

You may be aware that indie games blog TIGSource is having a B-game Competition. You may also be aware that I run a website dedicated to celebrating and creating more of that sort of thing.

It seems clear that if I don't manage to pull out something magnificent for this contest, I may as well just shut my website down. So, I had an idea. A terrible, awesome idea. And I need your help to see it through.

The Team Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com entry into the competition will be called "The 100-In-1 Klik & Play Pirate Kart", and it will consist of 100 small, terrible games made in two hours using Klik & Play. (You don't actually have to use Klik and Play, but the two hour time limit is firm.) Furthermore, as time is short and it will never happen without an even more insane deadline, all 100 games will be made this weekend. As further incentive, I am even offering prizes (in the form of terrible videogames in the mail) for those who contribute most greatly to our glorious cause.

Join us! If you're not up to cranking out lots of random-ass games this weekend, then consider at least doing one or two. It's great fun.

Further details are available on Glorious Trainwrecks Dot Com.

You know you want to be in on this! IT IS YOUR DESTINY.

Hey, I wrote a song! It's for the upcoming game I'm writing for GloriousTrainwrecks Dot Com, which is a remake of a terrible QBasic game I wrote when I was 11.

The song is called "The Alien Zit (Love Theme From Alien Zit 2000)", and it's basically the pinnacle of human achievement. I suggest you give it a listen.

There should be a new Canadian flag, and this image should be it.

I just realized on the way to work that this weekend is the first time I have sat down with my Apple IIgs and given it the kind of love and adoration that it deserves in literally like FIVE YEARS. I am so glad that I have finally built the perfect solution that maximizes the accessibility of all my old computers. Basically, I have a wall shelf above a table which houses five computers + disk drives. All of the disk drives are on the bottom shelf, and there's a hole to dangle all their cabling out of (and provide power to). Then, all of the power bricks for everything are plugged in underneath the table, with appropriate cords run up the wall into cord clips for absurdly easy access. On the table is a brand new 14" television which all of these computers can use as a monitor. When I want to play, I just remove the computer from the shelf and plug in the appropriate cables. I'm up and running within 15 seconds. It's fantastic.

Hey, you guys: Angela and I are writing a musical based on the movie Twister. This has sort of been happening half-jokingly for a while now, but I over the weekend I escalated the stakes by actually sitting down and recording Me, Joe. In reponse, Angela sent me the following in an email:

I am writing lyrics for He's in it for the Money (Not the Science). I see it as a large dance number with solo bits in it for exposition.

I cannot friggin' WAIT to get my hands on it.

You remember those shareware CDs you used to buy, with, like, a thousand games on them? And some of those games were clearly started because some sort of drunken dare? And maybe on the morning after the dare, the developer woke up, looked at what he'd done, and said, "Hell, I can work with this." And over the next few months, whenever the mood strikes him, he throws together a hodgepodge of random game design elements, maybe interspersing sound clips from his favourite TV show -- digitized sound is so cool, man! -- until one day, he decides that he's tired of looking at his nasty, hacky source code, declares it done, slaps on a README imploring the player to send him a postcard, and uploads it to his favourite BBS.

I wish there was a proper word for it. It's practically a genre all its own, and it's all but dead now.

I say, nuts to that.

On an absurd, late-night, sleep-deprived impulse, of the very sort that spawns such works, I decided that I would set up GloriousTrainwrecks.com. The goal of the site is twofold. First, it is to chronicle and celebrate the past gems of this dead genre. Second, and more important, it is to make ridiculous games with my friends.

Come make games with me, friends. Create ridiculous, fantastic, terrible videogames. I don't mind if you use GameMaker or Klik and Play. I don't mind if you have no artistic talent and use clipart for everything.

In fact, I kind of prefer it.

There are some things that have been occupying my brain lately that I figure might be worth getting down for posterity.

Let's start with the thing you all know about already.

It is a strange experience, knowing someone who is right this second aboard the International Space Station. I've known about it pretty much since I started working for Intentional Software, but it's a way more concrete thing, now. I mean, we got a phone call from space at work this afternoon. How incredible is that?

Angela and I attended Charles' launch party at the Museum of Flight; watching live as he streaked into the sky was awesome and terrifying. Fire comes out of the rocket and it just sits there, for a full ten seconds. When they say "liftoff" and it still isn't moving... man, it's only two seconds before you actually see it move, but it was an eternity. The whole first minute of the rocket in the air is just Don't blow up don't blow up don't blow up. The rocket keeps moving to the right, the visibly lit-up area growing and shrinking dramatically depending on the cloud cover. Afterwards, I realized that the rocket was probably intended to become basically horizontal by the time it reached its intended altitude, so it goes into orbit instead of just shooting off into oblivion, but at the time it looked like it was coming crashing down to Earth. Only the soothing insistence of the disembodied voices describing everything as "nominal" kept me from gnawing my arm off.

(If you watch that video, definitely skip to about the 9:30 mark where they *pop* into zero-G. It's pretty awesome, how immediate the change is.)

One of the things I'm doing besides following his website is attempting to participate, in my own sort of way, in some time-honoured cosmonaut rituals. Now, I can't pee on the tire of the bus that takes me out to the rocket (a tradition dating back to when Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, legitimately had to go), but one thing they do that I can conceivably participate in is the traditional watching of The White Sun of the Desert, a Soviet-era cult classic film.

Of course, when I noticed the throwaway line on that Wikipedia page about there being a computer game adaptation, well, I knew what I had to do.

It's in Russian, of course, so I don't understand a word of it, and I haven't seen the film, so I don't really know what's going on, and the Google-translated walkthrough is about as coherent to me as the Russian dialogue. The background art style is 1997-era 3D rendering with the animation being pencil sketches brought to life in Flash, and the puzzles are mostly inane. Yet I can't help but love it. I mean:

Look at that! That's from the first scene of the game! How can you not be charmed by that? I think I might write an article about it at some point.

The other thing that's been on my mind is this:

Yes, my wife is, as we speak, toiling away, growing a tiny human being inside of her body. (The ultrasound is a picture of the baby's profile. So that blob that sort of looks like a David Bowman, the Star Child? That's its head.) Let it be known that I have massive respect for the effort her body is exerting to make that happen.

(I also have massive respect for the self-restraint necessary to not go crazy when people start spouting random advice and gruesome pregnancy-related stories. Seriously, we had a friend's mom call for her while she was visiting us, and decide to let Angela know, before she passed the phone on to our oblivious friend, the method that she had used to toughen up her nipples in preparation for breastfeeding. Angela was not really sure who was talking to her at the time.)

To answer your inevitable pair of questions:

• October 7th, currently
  
• We don't know, they can't tell us the sex yet
  
• (Even when they do, we might not tell anyone, in an attempt to curb the inevitable colour-coded gifts. Although I'm sure none of you will be a part of that problem.)

So, yes! Exciting times!

Apparently I can't make a proper poll, so vote in comments:

• It's spelled "Krazy Karpet"
  
• It's spelled "Krazy Carpet"
  
• It's spelled "Crazy Karpet"
  
• It's spelled "Crazy Carpet"
  
• It's spelled "Crazy Canadians! Always makin' shit up."

Inquiring minds want to know! Google results are inconclusive, and the results for any spelling are depressingly low. You've all ridden a $2 sheet of plastic down a snowhill, right? Right?

So, I'm woefully behind at just over 10,000 words with 17 days remaining to write the other 40,000. But 10,000 is more than I'd assumed was possible without killing myself, and I was only really miserable the first few days.

My novel sounds stupid to me when I give the one sentence pitch, but people seem to react positively to it, so here it is: A group of outcast teenagers in rural Manitoba sets out to write the Great Canadian Videogame.

These kids are fucking smarter than me, man. They've come up with like four interesting game designs, at least one of which I now actually want to exist, called "Milquetoast the Ghost." (There's another one based on the observation that there haven't been any good games about eating since Pac-Man that might be good as a hack of Abuse.)

I'm thinking of making the obscure author of the seminal book on a programming language that is twenty years out of fashion into a character. He does puppets now.

I should be writing words in my novel rather than in my Livejournal! Let's go do that.

WORLD BEARD CHAMPIONSHIPS

I've gotta go see this one day.

(That's my boss.)

Man, it seriously never rains in Seattle. What the hell? I was lied to.

I'm writing a novel next month! So is Angela. You should join us!

Oh, shit, you guys. Why did no one tell me that there was a Super Famicom interface for the Barcode Battler?

Events!

• Winnipeg!
  
  • I visited!
    
  • Fun was had by all.
    
  • Winnipeg Folk Festival!
    
    • That 1 Guy was a sight to behold.
• 1-Year Wedding Anniversary!
  
  • Holy shit!
    
  • It's been a year already!
    
  • We both managed to get the date wrong!
    
  • Angela got me Guitar Hero!
    
    • It is amazing!
      
    • I hereby declare that the first wedding anniversary is no longer the paper anniversary, but the Guitar Hero anniversary.
  • We went to Vancouver and saw Phantom of the Opera!
    
    • I learned that the Phantom is filled with unquenchable angst!
      
    • He would definitely be the life of your party.
      
    • Made me curious what the hell they managed to do with Return of the Phantom.
  • In preparation for our upcoming Housewarmiversary extravaganza this Saturday, we bought furniture! This included:
    
    • A sofabed!
      
    • Two Gamepods!
      
      • They were cheap!
        
      • Also awesome.
        
      • It is a chair that not only has speakers embedded in it, but vibrates along with the bass. As such, it makes the:
        
        • Ultimate Rez chair!
          
        • I was tingly for an hour after beating Area 5.
• Work!
  
  • It continues!
    
  • I should be doing it right now!

I totally kept meaning to tell you guys: I am moving to Bellevue, Washington for a while to go work for this guy at this company. In fact, I am here in Bellevue now, in a cheap hotel with knobs on the TV and free wireless internet, and I start tomorrow!

If you read my nerdblog, you may be aware that I've been really excited about crazy ideas like concept programming and language-oriented development, which have no real usable implementations yet. Intentional Software is doing that stuff! This is dream-job territory, here.