Stupid Flash game OTD

Nanaca Crash!!!. Like that penguin-baseball thing, only with homicidal anime-girl bicyclists. (Thanks, rserocki)

I'll let you figure it out for yourself (it does have instructions, but they're in Japanese), but will add one thing I had to be told about: when you see 'SPECIAL', click the mouse before the word vanishes.

My current record is 4080.12m.

spoiler-free Carnivale comments before it gets too late

My only real comment about this week's episode is that I can't fathom why this wasn't the season finale. We had no fewer than three major character revelations, and a cliffhanger ending. When I saw that ending, I groaned, thinking that surely this was the finale, but then there were preview clips for next week. Of course I'm looking forward to seeing what happens that much sooner, but it's still weird.

I felt bad for the hotel guy and hoped that he had merely fainted (assisted by the fact that Ben had slugged him a minute before). I don't think that Ben would have used his powers right then and there had he seen that he was hurting everyone nearby.

I thought the bit with the hotel sign was great (it's the sort of thing that would happen in one of "the Pope's" RPG sessions) but rolled my eyes when Ben said "Henry Scudder!" at it. Yes, dude, we know by now.

Random krep

I picked up the venusian death flu at last weekend's SF marathon, so have been more cloistered than usual. Oh, I still have to do a film writeup, don't I? I've been too narrow-focused on work for it. Not too much longer.

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Non-technical endusers tend not to pay attention to error messages. That is, they recognize that an error message means that something has gone wrong, but they don't attempt to extract any further semantic meaning from it. I have had this conversation or its functional equivalent more times than I can count (including this weekend):

"Hey, I tried to do [foo] and it gave me an error."
"What kind of error?"
"I don't know. Should I go back and check?"
"Yes please."

I wonder (assuming my observation is valid) why this is. The assumption that any information provided by a machine in an "error state" can't be at all helpful, since it's broken by definition?

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If I designed Harvest Moon I'd make it so the chickens would get mad at you if you picked up their eggs and then immediately ate them while they watched, especially given the satisfied little yum-yum animation your guy does when he eats stuff (including raw eggs). But this is an optimally efficient strategy, at least until you buy a kitchen. I wince when I do it.

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Mmm, pizza. Note the desert. (Only a subset of my audience will get this.)