in orbit

I Was On CNN To Other Day

by Mike (9:06pm EST) | Tags: Serious Business, Internet! - 2 Comments

After you sit through what I assume will be a ~30 second unskippable ad you can jump forward to 1:50 or so to see me doing computer stuff (or you can watch the entire report if you want). I was actually working on a thing that randomly censored the search results on our site for the day (because SOPA/PIPA are the worst, but you already knew that). Also I didn't know the camera guy was recording me. It's pretty amusing to be the 'guy who is working in the background' on CNN though. I always knew I'd make it!

Pretty exciting, I guess! Also: happy 2012!

Computer

by Mike (1:05pm EST) | Tags: Funny Stuff, Internet! - 0 Comments

This is how you hack, right guys? Right? Yeah? Computer? Mirror, you have made my day.

I Made A Meat Boy Thing

by Mike (2:17am EST) | Tags: Gaming Stuff, Creative, Fun Stuff - 0 Comments

Super Meat Boy is a game that appealed to me on a pretty fundamental level. It's a platformer focused on speed and crazy, well-timed jumps and has relatively little penalty for mistakes (you restart what is generally a pretty short level). It's basically the platform game I've always wanted. I was almost compelled to play it, even though at times it evoked high levels of frustration. The main thing about that, however, was even though I would mash my fleshy body into a saw blade (the same saw blade) dozens upon dozens of times I always knew why I had screwed up and I never blamed the game for being unfair. Not even once.

So with the release of the level editor I decided to see what I could come up with and I put together a five-level chapter called "Brownie Goes To Hell" which I'm fairly pleased with. It's not perfect but if you have the PC version of Super Meat Boy you should load up Super Meat World (which requires twenty bandages to unlock) and search for it in the chapters section, if you're so inclined. I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Spam Central. Population: Me

by Mike (2:11pm EST) | Tags: Funny Stuff, Internet! - 5 Comments

For a while the cursory spam checking I wrote for this blog back in 2005 (or so) worked, mostly due to the unbridled predictability of comment spammers and at least partially due to the complete obscurity of both this specific blog and the CMS it runs on. In particular I think the way it handled comments before I redesigned it was totally insane and no half-assed spambot parser could figure out what was going on.

But then I redid a bunch of front-end stuff, which included making comments easier to make (though the underlying system remained the same) and apparently that opened the floodgates. Also oddly enough I made an error in the javascript that made it impossible for real people to comment and any spambot that didn't first parse the javascript would have no issues posting. I'm not proud, though in my defense nobody told me and I never comment on my own blog unless it's a reply to someone.

Regardless, the ways of the old have been thrown away and I finally implemented akismet filtering (I had written a simple class for another project so I was mostly able to drop it in). So hopefully that is that. Oh and I also fixed that javascript error so if you want to leave a comment you totally can. I swear.

Gawking, Part II

by Mike (3:12am EST) | Tags: Serious Business, Internet! - 0 Comments

As a brief follow-up to my critique of Gawker network's design I feel that I also ought to critique the thing I am perhaps more qualified to; namely the tech behind it all.

Along with Twitter (specifically 'new Twitter') and I'm told Facebook (I don't use it enough to really comment) Gawker has adopted the hash-bang syntax (see the #! in their URL? hash-bang) which basically lets Javascript manage the entire site. Any web developer worth his salt can obviously attest to how much of a good idea this notion is. Personally I consider myself to be a front-end developer (with a great degree of back-end experience) and even as a big fan of Javascript and all it's capabilities I would never entrust it to such a task. That would be like entrusting HTML to be consistent between Safari and IE6.

Others have covered the issue in greater detail than I, but suffice to say the type of framework that depends entirely on Javascript is not one I would prefer to depend on myself. The hash-bang syntax is a hack at best, and a potential disaster worst. When your single point of failure is Javascript of all things you may be in for a world of pain. Go ahead, disable JS and take a look at Gawker.com or new Twitter and compare it to any other site. Even JS-heavy sites like Google News work with it disabled. I can access an HTML-only version of GMail, a web app that doesn't even need to follow web conventions. It's something to think about.

Hopefully hash-bang does not become some kind of new standard, but you never can tell with these things. In the end leaving display of your site's content up to the client is a poor decision, at best. We'll see how things pan out in that regard. I won't actually get upset until the New York Times web site starts to use it.

Gawking

by Mike (1:49am EST) | Tags: Creative, Serious Business, Internet! - 0 Comments

While the Gawker Media collection of sites have never really been my cup of tea for any number of reasons (which I won't get into) you really can't deny the popularity of their network in their respective industries. If you want some video game news out there you need to get it up on Kotaku. If you want the world to know about your new unreleased iPhone, leave it in a bar so Gizmodo can buy it off some guy. If you're a celebrity and want your inner-most secrets leaked to the public then a good bet is to contact someone at Gawker. I'm starting to get catty so I'll just move on, but you get the idea.

For once the news of the day for was not the content of one of these sites but rather how it is presented. Let me get this out of the way first: the new design, aesthetically, is a huge improvement over the old design. The old design was fairly hideous and wasted a lot of space. About the only things it did well were present a ton of the site's most recent content and keep some big-ticket articles of note up at the top. But now, out with the old, in with the new. The new Gawker sites look like a professionally designed iPad app. In fact that's the thing that most people seem to think of first when they see it, which was obviously the intended reaction.

That itself isn't bad, but sadly the site not only looks like an iPad app but seems to function as if it was intended to be one. This fact is made highly unfortunate due to the site being broken in mobile Safari. I don't have an iPad to test it in myself but it's more or less unusable on my iPhone, and I haven't heard much better from iPad owners.

Continue reading...

The Latest and Greatest

by Mike (8:03pm EST) | Tags: Geek Stuff, Creative, Internet! - 0 Comments

After a roughly two day hiatus this blog is back and (possibly) better than ever. That's actually partially a lie since for it to be better than ever I would have to get rid of this CMS (written in my foolish youth) but that's a project for another time.

Continue reading...

Games Completed: Shank

by Mike (1:38am EST) | Tags: Gaming Stuff - 3 Comments

Shank is really short, which is why I finished it about day after I posted that I had started it (I just didn't get around to writing a review until now). The game told me I finished it in a little over three and a half hours though that probably doesn't include deaths and such because Steam says I played it for 5.1 hours. Regardless, it's very short and more or less pretty straightforward. You have a few weapons, you beat up a bunch of dudes and then you face a boss. Rinse, repeat.

The good is that the game looks great, and the animation is pretty spectacular, particularly when switching between each weapon as you fight. The transitions there are seamless. I believe they actually hand animated each possible combo, which makes sense since it's the only way to achieve the look they ended up with. The game is also stylish and I like the art style a lot.

The combat is mostly fun but like a lot of beat-em-ups it wears thin after a bit and maybe 75% into the game I kind of started getting tired of it. There's not a heck of a lot of variation to the enemies as far as functionality goes, but they all look different enough that it doesn't matter too much.

The bosses are all pretty cool but with the exception of the final one they're all a matter of biding time until they enter one specific sequence at which point you can grapple or pounce them to take away a big portion of their health. You can spend hours chipping away if you want but that's obviously not really worth it. Repeat four times and they're dead. It's fine but none of them are overly challenging. Though there is one boss in particular (the second to last one) who is a bit quirky. It took me entirely too long to figure out that you can only pounce him from one side, otherwise your pounce will miss entirely.

There's also a slight amount of platforming to be done, though little of it is overly difficult, but it does help keep the game interesting at the end. My major complaint about the platforming is that it almost feels too simple, making it something like a 2D Uncharted 2 where one button does everything and the main character will just grab the only thing he can because there's really no other way to go. Not that I expect non-linearity, but something that makes you feel like you are actually in control of the movement is much more satisfying to me.

There's a story as well but it's mostly a poorly done rip-off of Kill Bill, which I'm sure was not the first revenge story but Shank certainly takes great pains to utilize many of Kill Bill's plot points. Of course cramming five hours of movie into maybe 15 minutes of cutscenes is a bit difficult so it ends up feeling very rushed. In fact it almost feels like they wanted the entire game to be you searching for the first guy and then suddenly more characters are introduced. It ends up feeling sloppy.

There's also the matter of really having no emotional attachment to the characters (including the titular character) so when something bad happens to one of them you kind of don't care. Shank himself is supposed to garner some feelings of sympathy from the player, however he is basically an emotionless killing machine throughout the game, so it's difficult to do so. I realize critiquing the emotional attachment to characters a short beat-em-up is a bit of a pointless thing to do but the game clearly intends for you to care on some level. Otherwise it could very easily play from some kind of campy Bad Dudes angle or at the very least dispense with the flashbacks and reveals and just stay light on the story (nobody would fault it for doing so). It just ends up as a sort of mishmash of something that was intended to be serious but is impossible to take seriously because not enough time was spent on it.

Regardless I enjoyed it enough to complete it (in spite of it slightly overstaying its welcome), so I guess it's a success in that way. I look forward to the developer's next project since there is a good base for a game here, and I have heard from a developer at Klei that they learned a lot from making the game, which is always good news.