This is not a photoshop.
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I have issued a list of demands to the developers at Turbine. They must give my character exclusive access to a new “I fart in your general direction” emote, deliver me 100 bottles of black dye, rename Bree to Lulzytown, and let me use Gandalf as a ride-able mount. If they fail to meet these demands by midnight tonight, I will destroy the shire auction house.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Lord of the Demolitions Online”
As soon as I saw this on Monday, I knew it was going to be the Saturday morning video for this week.
Link (YouTube) |
(For context: These are the same guys who did the treadmills video that was such a huge sensation a couple of years back.)
I’ve mentioned before that I hate DIAS videogames where you have to overcome a series of obstacles and any failure whatsoever means you have to do the entire thing again. And again. I don’t feel excitement when I’m playing. I feel a mounting sense of stress. I don’t feel exhilaration when I win. Just a grudging sense of relief.
I actually get that same panicky feeling when watching this video. Look at how complex and destructive this mess is. And how many places it could go wrong. This would take ages to reset. They made things even harder on themselves by integrating the timing of the song into the sequence, so that the gap in the song needs to line up with the glass-of-water “chimes”. Any alteration in speed before that point would ruin the take, even if the chain reaction wasn’t broken. And then you have the camera work: I still can’t figure out how the camera operator did his job. Look at how often he has to step over rails and tracks and possible debris. In some places – like the transition from the second floor to the ground floor – it’s not at all clear how a human being is doing this unless it’s someone who can fly. Or at least hover. So while this entire contraption is playing out, it’s pitted against whatever convolutions they’re going through to move the camera around smoothly.
They leave so much to chance. At the 3:15 mark, it would be easy for one of those little yellow balls to be in the way of the basketball, which would foil the entire take. And this is just seconds from the end! I would want to make sure the chancy stuff was at the beginning. I wouldn’t want anything doubtful going on in the later bits. Particularly after those destructive later steps.
As the video plays, I can’t help trying to calculate the odds of failure and multiplying that with the odds of failure from all previous steps and trying to deduce how long they spent in this Rube Goldberg purgatory. According to this article, it was 60 takes. The entire project took months.
How many TV’s were smashed? Did they patch the same piano up for every take, or did they have to get a new piano at some point? How long would a reset take if it failed near the end?
Much love to OK Go for bringing us so much entertainment.
A bit about MMOG’s as they age.
If you follow my Twitter you probably saw my comment last night that I hated the column I’d written and was scrapping it. A few people expressed interest. In order to prevent you from being eaten alive by speculation and curiosity, it was a bit on the fact that the Game Developers Choice Awards would be giving id Software co-founder and technical director John Carmack a lifetime achievement award. I’d intended to do a sort of tribute to the guy. Sort of, “For you young people, here is who this guy is and why you should care.” But it ended up coming across as kind of creepy and fanboyish instead of informative.
Go read the comic, then come back if you like and read a bit about the humor in this strip.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #174: Better Than Aquaman”
Kaiden is so fired for this.
Here’s a comic I wrote a month ago.
Here is a joke that appeared on Begeek.fr, this week.
Look, I don’t claim to own a joke. The internet is one big remix tape of ideas, feeding and looping back on itself. That’s what’s beautiful about it. It’s completely possible that begeek.fr saw the joke I wrote and thought it could be done better. Arguably, that’s what happened. The Begeek.fr version of the joke was picked up on the Consumerist and Gizmodo, as well as showing up on Digg in a big way.
But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to at least expect a link back. A hat tip. A “here is where the joke came from”. (And if begeek.fr wanted to maintain Plausible deniability – which they totally could have pulled off with a joke this simple – they shouldn’t have done a straight copy & paste of the third panel, which I photoshopped myself.)
But cut & pasting my work and then basically re-telling the joke I wrote with small modifications and then passing it off as an original idea is a jerk move. I would have loved to have a little sip of that massive Digg, Gizmodo, and Consumerist traffic. I work hard to draw attention to my stuff and build an audience, and breaks like that never come as often as I’d like. I think a small link is just a matter of basic courtesy, honesty, and manners. Particularly when the traffic starts pouring in. It wouldn’t have hurt begeek.fr at all to say where the joke came from or what it was based on. It’s not like I’m asking for money. Just a few bytes of HTML and some basic decency.
(And don’t bother, now. It’s too late.)
Update: begeek.fr left a comment below indicating that the image was sent to them via email. Can’t really prove them wrong, so the matter is settled. I think they could have dodged this by just saying it came in email.
Sigh. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
Well, I’m off to make my next bit of entertainment. Maybe this one will hit the big time…
The theft of a handkerchief: Will it, or will it not, end in mass murder?
You’ll have to read to find out.
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
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