Attention jadelennox

Illustrator Bob Staake has reimagined the fascinatingly gruesome 19th Century kids' morality book Der Srtruwwelpeter with modern graphics techniques. Flash website with short but unskippable intro heah. It's published by Fantagraphics.

(I dunno if JL would be more interested than anyone else, but she does have that one icon.)

(no subject)

Quick thoughts on Tetris DS:

They improved the WiFi setup over Mario Kart's in many ways. Most notably, all players have visible ELO ratings. Yay. They also print messages on the screen telling you in plain language that running away from a game will make you lose and guarantee injury to your rating. I hope that this discourages twits from quitting, a problem I see in Mario Kart all the time; it's not clear in that game that quitting = losing (though I suppose that after a while you'd notice that your loss record was oddly steep).

I haven't tried it yet, but it seems that you can directly invite friends (that is, people with whom you've exchanged friend codes) to join you for a game. This too would be scads better than Mario Kart's rather crappy friend system, which was simply the game's standard four-player matchmaking engine with a friends-only filter on it. There, if you had only one friend on-line, the system would pair you up and then stupidly sit there spinning for a minute or two, waiting for two more of your nonexistent friends to appear before giving up and letting the two of you race.

Gone, however, is Mario Kart's "Rivals", option, which matches you with people at around your skill level. There is simply a "worldwide" button that throws you in an arena with some random folks. I am holding out hope that a "rivals" button will appear after I've played enough to make my rating meaningful, since that is after all how ELO is supposed to work. (As it is, my rating quickly dropped below the starting figure and has remained there. And everyone else I've played so far is above it. And yea, I've been beat up a lot. I don't care; it's Tetris! It's a blast.)

---

It hasn't occurred to me before how Tetris makes rather cruel use of a positive feedback loop: as you do worse, the game gets harder, since you have less time to maneuver a piece into position when the stack of blocks is higher. Looking at it this way, I might prefer the mechanics of a similar-but-different game like Meteos. In that one, it's also dangerous to let the pile get too high, but since you can slide around blocks anywhere in the stack this is offset by the fact that more blocks gives you more degrees of freedom.

Boy I sure like Meteos. I wish that had WiFi.

Volity: Quality Jollity

If you're coming to betatest in person tonight, try to bring a laptop if you can; our token Intel PC is still dead, so we have fewer courtesy computers than before. (This despite the generous donation of a hard drive from lediva; it turns out we had a bum motherboard. A new one is en route.) Folks can use our office Macs if it comes down to it, of course.

I just picked up two piping-hot guest parking cards from the city, which means that I don't have three, or indeed any number greater than two, for two's all they give ya. So drive if you must, and I shall endeavor to accomodate. (Rumor has it that I can nullify parking tickets that guests receive, but rumor also has it that this is hard to actually do.)

If you can't make it in person, log in to the system between 7pm and 11pm eastern and find it crawling with activity. Info as always at http://volity.org/betatesting.html . In the past we've had great success with a mix of both kinds of players. Just hang out in the devchat.

However you plan on playing, please go download brand-new version 0.3.1 of Javolin first; it's so new that as I write this the packages are still uploading from my Mac to our server. (Update: they're done now.) The most important change from 0.3.0 is an improved invitation system that radiotelescope devised, which should eliminate the need for people to be on your roster before you could invite them to a table. Previous betapaloozas showed us that, while this looked fine on paper, it was confusing and awful to actually use. We look forward to seeing how well this new way works.

---

There has been a surge in activity from total strangers since I posted a testing request to Looney Labs' Fluxx mailing list. This has actually been great; several people have been playing Fluxx over and over (usually against bots), and occasionally filing new tickets for us. Our favorite one so far was filed by a player who discovered a way in which the Fluxx ruleset itself is broken!

This player and a bunch of bots got the game into a state where both the draw and discard piles were empty (meaning that some players were hoarding cards and not playing any Hand Limit rules, which is a bad habit of our current bots), and a bot played Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look, I drew Draw 2 and Use 'Em. OK, well, the draw pile is out, so let's reshuffle the discard pile into it. Oh, look...

---

So how about that there developer beta? I have two or three discrete bits of programming to accomplish still, and then I need to perform some release engineering. I am predicting that the betapalooza (plus this cold I have) will preclude me from finishing today, but I am hell-bent on getting it all wrapped up before Saturday.

I plan on making this the first release to the CPAN of the Perl stuff. This is actually exciting, and a big step.

---

Volity is kicking butt. We need to start thinking about money again, soon.

RNM note

Those of you who are pondering going to a certain local-tribe movie night vs. the betapalooza this evening should not feel guilty about choosing the movie instead. The film in question is quite delightful and you would probably enjoy it. I've seen it twice.

You could always bring a laptop to the movie night and play Volity games from there for maximum exposure/confusion. :)

(Pondering switching nights yet again to minimize these sorts of conflicts. fooey)

Update I'm not talking about the ITA movie night. You're on your own there, ITAers.

(no subject)

Ha ha. daerr points me to a needlessly all-AJAX website that completely fails to render in Safari. Or rather, renders just enough that it looks like it loaded correctly, and there just happens to be nothing at all on the page.

I expect to see more of this; it's gonna be the Web 2.0 version of a broken all-Flash site.