Flizzo My Nizzo

08:31 pm

I didn't want to tell you before the dust had settled, but it looks like we're buying a house. There is relatively little work to do on the house itself, so my first project is to wire the first floor so that we can play Zaireeka there whenever we want. It involves multiple Airport Express stations.

11:12 am - Found art

In a bar on a run yesterday, I saw some amazing art. It was 15 or so vibrant prints with traced or silhouetted subjects, sometimes with things like barcodes and boxes with nutritional information embedded in the prints. I asked the owner where he'd gotten them, and he said that his aunt received them all as samples from a French printing company about ten years ago. I can understand why they make such compelling samples for printers, so I'm hoping that I can find some remotely as cool as those. I'm getting free samples from as many online printing companies as I can find. Allport Designs is a pretty meager graphic design firm, but I'm sure we'll churn something out at some point. Do you have any places to recommend?

08:37 pm - roland burris

does anyone else think that he sounds like Jimmie Walker?

12:18 am - rec.games.roguelike.lambda

So protomech and I have been talking about the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge for a bit, and something clicked for me the other day. I've had an interesting idea about Psychonauts universe roguelike with some fresh gameplay ideas that I won't bore you with. The seven day thing has really bothered me, though. I'm a pretty mediocre coder at best, so I'm already fretting about the stupid pipework that gets in the way of actually making the game, pipework that people recreate for every roguelike*. But what if there were some cool roguelike skeleton** that you could modify endlessly in order to get what you want? There is interesting common ground among these games:

- The ugly guts of things like ray tracing, level building, and such should be done. I shouldn't have to write a level generator or an event manager, but I should be able to modify them as needed. If I want to inject a check for sanity or bladder fullness when my character's hourglass is empty, it should be simple.
- A suitable level of abstraction allows you to write most spells/abilities in a single line. That certainly helps when you're writing hundreds or thousands of them.
- The worlds tend to be consistent. It's you (and sometimes friendly AI) versus bad AI, maybe with some neutral AI thrown in. Even if the stuff doesn't feel all that similar from game to game, especially when it comes to things like character development, they're surprisingly consistent.
- Large decisions can be easy. Things like persistent levels are check boxes. Things like level generator seeders are simple data files, especially if you want things like vaults or themes.
- The data generation should be straightforward enough to be done on its own by hand.


What do you think?


* I admit here that I have a lot more *band experience than anything else, but I've played a fair amount of ToME and Crawl and NetHack, and I've played enough of these types of games in general to have a solid understanding.

** protomech prefers "framework", but I like skeleton. The idea is that you get a fully functional and impressively boring, worthless game, and all you have to do is patch it with simple serialized data in order to make it a real roguelike.

11:56 pm - /bin/fish

I found out about the fish shell sort of randomly, but it's kind of neat, and I'm surprised I've never heard of it before.

05:08 pm

RIP

Fred, Ethel, and Lucy

12:16 pm - alabama/louisiana

so (née) jano and I will be in Mobile/Daphne on Saturday and maybe Sunday, 20-21 December. We will be in New Orleans from 21-26 December. Who wants to get together?

07:25 pm

Lazyweb, what does the scouter say about the Dow's power level?

08:38 pm - symmetry

during npr's little thing about the nobel prize award in physics last night, they got an audio quote from phillip schewe, a spokesperson for the american institute of physics. in it, he said this in particular: "we sort of instinctively want the universe to be symmetric; we want it to be regular." why does he equate the two? this seemed really weird to me.

08:32 am

For those of you who will not be attending my wedding for whatever reason, do not fret! I will be liveblogging the sacred event from the altar on Facebook! If you're not my Facebook friend, and you don't know how to add me, you probably don't need to see my wedding feed.

09:59 am

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

02:22 am - just in case you were wondering

he's baaaaaack

hey grumpy_sysadmin, you still have a copy of the tom delay picture?

12:55 pm - Internet ministers

Internet ministers
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle

08:27 pm - Shuffle board

Shuffle board
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle

02:50 pm - Swedish chef

Swedish chef
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle

12:42 pm - O rly

O rly
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle

12:29 am - strikeout

poast

10:57 pm - diaper time

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DyMi2fgPWPA

This is from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Is the "bonus clip" for real?

06:41 pm - Champ

Champ
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle

02:30 pm - New jacket

New jacket
Originally uploaded by flizzlemcnizzle