You are alone. Or at least it seems that way at first glance. In front of you are grassy hills spattered with trees, and behind them lie some larger mountains and some odd looking stone structures. You turn around and see sand and a vast body of water. Is it an ocean or just a large lake? Difficult to say. You can see some islands off in the distance but not much else. You take in your surroundings and gradually realize that you're not actually alone. Up on the hills appear to be a few cows and a pig. They don't seem to be doing much, but it's nice to know living things inhabit this place.

Okay, now what? Better look around, right? Seems logical. You head towards the hills and mountains. You discover hidden alcoves and shallow caves. You meet more cows and pigs and even some sheep and ducks. What exactly is this place? You keep wandering and eventually stumble onto a much deeper cave. It's dark and scary inside. You can't even venture too far in before it becomes impossible to navigate in the dark. You turn around and head back to the outside. The sun is setting. That makes you nervous, though you're not sure why. Maybe you should take up refuge in this cave? That thought doesn't sit well with you, plus the cave is too dark anyway. Instead you dig up some dirt with your bare hands, just enough to make a small makeshift house in the side of a mountain. You leave only an opening big enough to walk out of.

I just kind of enjoy the Chrome ads in general:

After hearing about it and knowing what it does and even seeing a few examples my curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to mess around with some CSS3 stuff. For those of you who may be less web developer-y, it's just CSS but with some added wackiness that actually goes beyond just simple styling and into crazy territory. Of course it also goes into browser support territory and ends up being woefully inconsistent among most browsers (shocking, I kn0w), so it's ultimately useless right now unless you want to force people to use Chrome or Safari (which is not recommended).

Clicking 'Read More' will get you some quickly done examples of a couple of CSS3 properties, including some Webkit specific animation stuff. So if you want the full effect I recommend you read this post in Chrome or Safari or your Webkit nightly build of choice. Firefox 3.5 will work for some, but not all, and Internet Explorer will fail in every way. See how annoying that was?

I'm not normally one to post about search referrals, but when they're amusing, they're amusing, so what can you do? It also lets you see how few people get here via web searches, but whatever I never claimed to be popular:

Keywords	Visits	% visits
hammerhead sharks	7	36.84%
hot sister	2	10.53%
canadian bills joke	1	5.26%

I happen to have IE6 installed at work for CSS/Javascript testing purposes and also perhaps to make my life somewhat bizarre; I often bring my MacBook into work so I can test stuff in IE8. Word on the street today was that YouTube is dropping IE6 support. Indeed:



The final nail in the coffin? One can only hope. I've been dreaming of this day for almost a decade I think.

At the surface Erik Svedäng's Blueberry Garden doesn't appear to be much. As far as games go, it's fairly stripped down. It comes across as a platformer, though one seemingly without a clear goal. the world is mostly white, with plants and random animals adding some color to the bleak world. Unlike a regular 2D platformer, however, your goal is not to move from left to right to get to the finish, but rather to explore and find out what your goal is.

The goal itself becomes fairly evident after your first playthrough which will almost certainly end with your demise. Find various large objects such as apples, pencils and top hats hanging around the world and stack them. Touching one of these objects (or standing next to it) will cause it (and yourself) to teleport to the stacking point. The higher your stack the more you can explore by jumping or flying over the game's geography. Some items are easy to collect; just walk over to them. Some take a bit of thinking to get to.

There first 'mission' of the game is to turn off a large faucet that is flooding the world. There's a water level to the entire thing and after a certain amount of time the water will begin to rise. Our player cannot survive underwater unaided for very long, so once the water raises above all the land (or your stack) the game sadly ends.

Helping you out during the game are various kinds of fruit. There are red berries of some sort, something resembling onions (though they grow on trees), some kind of star-shaped fruit and of course blueberries. Red berries and onions alter the terrain when you eat them. So the area you happen to be standing by can be warped by eating one. This adds an interesting element to the game since stacked items are positioned in the stack in the same position they are collected in. So if you have a pencil laying on its side it will appear that way in the stack, however if you tilt it 45 degrees by utilizing berries then it will appear in the stack tilted 45 degrees as well. Using this method it's possible to create a taller stack with fewer items.

The game's soundtrack, a simple, almost somber piano tune, adds immensely to the atmosphere of the game. Often kicking in when you leap from your stack and fly across the level, the sparseness of the world combined with the music is something of an experience. It's a very 'indie' experience that some may not notice or care for, but it made the game extremely relaxing and enjoyable for me.

At a meager five dollars on Steam (sorry non-Windows users, it's an XNA game), Blueberry Garden is certainly not a major purchase. Once you figure it out there's not much more to the gameplay (I have played it for a total of 1.7 hours according to Steam) but its mechanics are simple enough, and its atmosphere interesting enough that you may find yourself replaying it even after you've completed it.

Dave Perry recently posted some game review scoring stats gleaned by an independent source in his blog. The list of 20 publisher (the full, unreleased list contains many more) shows the top and bottom 10 publishers based on their games' Metacritic scores which are of course a weighted average of review scores from various sites.

The results are interesting for a variety of reasons. First off the top score (held by Rockstar) is 19. The system works by awarding positive, negative or zero points based on review scores. In R*'s case they have 23 titles in Metacritic. Six of them are worth 2 points, ten worth 1 point each and three of those points are canceled out by three D-rated games (worth -1). If you're wondering why that only adds up to 19 games it's because four of them simply don't count for or against the score. This seems off to me, but we'll just run with it for now.

Regardless, R* has the top score clocking in at a whopping 19 points. The bottom score is held by Ubisoft with an impressive(ly depressing?) -148 points. For those of you keeping track that puts the median score around -65, which means that the vast majority of video games are shit.

My second issue with the data is how it doesn't quite seem 'right'. For instance look at the #3 and #4 ranked publishers. Blizzard, highly commended for their addictive, polished and downright beautiful games, has a score of 11. Microsoft comes very close to Bilzzard with 10 points. However looking only slightly deeper we see the apparent flaws in this system. Blizzard's 11 points come from a meager sevem titles, four for 2 points, three for 1 point each. Blizzard has zero games that didn't count or counted for negative points, which would seem to mean they put out only a few games (less than one per year) but those games are of very high quality. Conversely Microsoft's 10 points comes from a set of 110 games. They published 103 more games than Blizzard since 2000 but also earned one fewer point. So it would seem the distribution of points among Microsoft's games is nowhere near as good as Blizzard's. Indeed if you look at the breakdown the majority of MS published games fall in B-range with the rest mostly distributed below B and only eight (7% of total) getting an A score.

A perhaps more accurate gauge of how consistent a publisher is would be to look at the average score per game, and indeed this paints a much different picture of the stats:

Publisher	Avg. Score
2D Boy	2.00
Blizzard	1.57
Stardock	1.17
Rockstar	0.82
Valve	0.75
Telltale	0.61
Bethesda	0.28
Square-Enix	0.11
Microsoft	0.09
Nintendo	0.06

This places Microsoft much lower than Blizzard by quite a bit. In fact MS's per-game average is below 0.1, as is Nintendo's (which is even lower). This is more or less intuitive based on the number of titles each publisher puts their name on. There are a bunch of AAA titles (Gears of War, Halo etc for MS, Mario Galaxy, Twilight Princess et al for Nintendo) that bring up the overall score enough that the publisher remains consistent in the eyes of the calculation.

Keep in mind that the maximum possible average (obtained by 2D Boy) is 2.0, so the fact that Blizzard is hovering near 1.6 is very impressive. Speaking of 2D Boy, it's also worth noting that they should probably be dropped from the list entirely because their publishing efforts consist of two titles; the PC and Wii versions of World of Goo. Both of those scored very well but with such a small sample consisting of what is realistically only a single game doesn't seem to be statisically relevant.

And so, if you were looking for the most consistent publisher in video games that would be Blizzard, as one might expect. However I'd hesitate to suggest these stats, or even Metacritic in general would be a good gauge of much of anything. Essentially throwing away an entire set of scores for each publisher (the C-level games) as well as not weighting anything in any significant way based on the volume of games makes it suspect. However I'm sure there is some useful info to be gleaned from Metacritic, though I'm not going to hold my breath thanks to arbitrary score scales or bizarre scoring systems that many game review sites use. All that we cab really gather from this data is that there are a lot of games out there and the majority of them are not very good, and I confess I already knew that before we started. Video games!

In an effort to remain consistent, I'm going to write a quick update on the release of Safari 4, or rather Safari 4's Beta, as seems to be the new software custom.



Weirdly enough a good portion of Safari 4's UI seems to have taken a page from Chrome, though it's obviously stylized to Apple's standard (which is perhaps more appealing than Chrome's look). In fact the layout of the browser is almost an exact mirror of Chrome's, with a very minimalistic navigation bar containing front/back buttons, the URL bar and two settings buttons. Safari opts to have the refresh/stop button in the URL bar similar to the iPhone version of Safari whereas Chrome places is next to the back/forward buttons. The tabs in both browsers are at the top of the application in lieu the standard windows application header.

Also in what is perhaps an answer to numerous complaints, the tabs in Safari, at least when using the Windows Classic theme, utilize the color scheme and look of Windows rather than duplicating what the program looks like on the Mac.

Also, in keeping with my update during Chrome's release the Javascript engine, a very important feature of any browser, has been reworked.

Running the same speed test (which, again, is by no means any sort of official benchmark) I found the old version of Safari I had (3.2) took 300ms to run. The new version has improved upon that quite a bit as it completed the test in a scant 64ms. For reference sake, Chrome is still much faster (version 1.0.154.48 runs it in 28ms) and Firefox 3.0.6 is much slower (clocking in at 258ms).

Other interesting aspects of Safari 4 are nice, but largely cosmetic. Apple's take on Chrome's 'Most visited' page speaks volumes about the two companies. While Google's version is simple and utilitarian, Apple's accomplishes the same thing with a good degree of style thanks to some simple graphical additions. Your 'Top Sites' are displayed as if on a curved surface, complete with a reflection. It's gratuitous and perhaps unnecessary, but looking at it next to Chrome's simple, flat version is almost jarring.

Also not to be outdone, Safari implements its own version of iTunes' coverflow for the browser history and bookmarks. Instead of a simple link you get a bunch of screenshots that you can flip through. I'm not entirely sure what I think about that as it seems mostly unnecessary for such a thing to exist, but it doesn't really hinder the browser, and you can still use the bookmark list if you like (you can even shrink the coverflow graphics so you can't see them any more).

Mostly I'm excited about the Javascript thing though. I'm really looking forward to see what happens with Firefox 3.1 since it seems they've now stumbled their way to third place in that regard.

Yo bro, I heard you like to blog so I put a blog in your blog so you can blog while you blog.

Fuck. Anyway I finally made a Twitter account. Twitter is stupid but also oddly fun. I take back whatever I said about it. I'll probably add it to the sidebar some day too. It's a blog within a blog!

With the inauguration of Barack Obama comes the most immediate result of his presidency, the White House web site. It's interesting because Obama is really the first technically inclined president. The first we've had who has embraced the digital age. Clinton was 46 when he was elected in 1992, back when the internet was very, very young. Whitehouse.gov didn't actually launch until 1994 and was sparse at best. One or two (very 90s) redesigns followed including probably the most memorable, at least to me, though I couldn't tell you why.

George W. Bush was elected in the year 2000 and sworn in in January of 2001. Shortly after a horrible thing was put up to replace the minimalist Clinton-era site, though it was improved upon from time to time.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks a newer version was put up, though archive.org is missing anything between July and September of 2001, so it may have gone up sooner. That version, while not overly great by today's standards, was reasonable for 2001. Tabular layout, half-assed use of CSS and your old friend Verdana.

The 2001 version of the site received some tweaks during its tenure as First Web Site, but mostly kept the same look in a post-9/11 world. The last version I linked to remained the president's site through his 2004 reelection and up until early 2007 when a new version was put up. This new one, although better looking, was mostly just a restyling of the previous version. It was slightly wider but still had a tabular layout, which while acceptable in 2001 was a crime in 2007.

And now we have the current site, which was put up at almost the very moment the clock struck noon in Washington (elected presidents become president at noon on the third Tuesday of January regardless of whether or not they take the oath, which is mainly a formality). So now we have a site that looks a lot like Barack Obama.com, probably because it was designed by the same guy. There's a news ticker/slideshow at the top with crossfades, lots of little details and the site is remarkably standards compliant (stupid image borders). Also I should mention, since I've been harping on it, that the layout is entirely CSS driven. There is a single table but it's used to keep a form in line (which isn't perfect, but I can accept it). It's actually a nice looking, competent, well designed government web site, which is saying something since there are some pretty terrible ones out there. Okay that last one I mainly threw in because the URL is hilarious (and horrifying).

At any rate, while I may not be overly excited to finally have the word 'blog' be associated with the President of the United States, I think Obama's technical initiatives as well as him being the first president to utilize things like 'computers' and 'e-mail' at least shows some signs of hope for the future. Does it mean that the government will finally stop being baffled by technological wonders such as MP3 players and video games? Probably not immediately, but the chances of congress understanding things like DRM and government-sanctioned censorship of violent games and why they may not necessarily be the best thing for the American people may not be as far away as I once thought.

So how about that? A little hope from a simple web page. Promises as advertised. Let's see what else this new guy can do.

For those who listen to the 'cast of the Idle Thumbs variety, they've finally put up their Games of the Year, deftly named the GOTY.cx in a flash of brilliance. Or grossness. Anyway the picks by Chris, Nick and Jake are somewhat expected if you keep up with the podcast, so I suggest the reader GOTYs for some insightful, hilarious and unconventional picks.

Ranging from GTA4 to Mega Man 9 to Imagine Party Babyz the list has it all! Also a couple of my own hastily written reviews can be seen on pages 2, 4 and 5, written as such since I thought they were casting a GOTY pod (Jake works the same place I do, so I usually know when he's leaving to record one) and I wrote my email in about 15 minutes. They weren't doing that at all though, so I could have maybe written something more readable and with less use of the word 'retarded'.

I'd like to have my own list of sweet 2008 games on this blog thingy like I did last year, but I haven't played some of the games I feel I'd want to add to the list, so if I manage to finish them up in the next month I might do that, but otherwise just take the Thumbse.cx list since it's pretty good. Except for Space Giraffe. Fuck that game.

Hey it's the yearly Shacknews White Elephant thingy where a bunch of nerds on the internet give another nerd something hilarious or possibly something totally useless! Either way it's kind of fun. Sadly I have been slacking on my gift giving this year (though I plan to remedy that soon) but I weirdly enough received mine from someone I actually know in real life. How crazy is that? Anyway he sent me some items which may or may not include a large, pink dildo and some tampons. Kind of takes the meaning of 'better to give than receive' to a whole other level.

So for those who may not have known, my domain (one of them anyway), vect.org (don't click that, it doesn't go anywhere) was hosted on a very old Linux desktop machine cobbled together from old, abandoned computers and parts I bought on eBay for cheap. Literally the only new part in it was a 64MB stick of memory. The hard drive I believe is now headed towards 10 years old, and god knows how old the rest of it is (though I can assure you the hard drive is the oldest piece). Anyway, for the last six or so years it's served as both a very crappy web host as well as a firewall/router/gateway machine for those who live in the vicinity of it.

Of course I moved out of my parents' house in aught six (as an aside I can't believe it's only been two years since that; it seems a lot longer somehow) and when your server administrator is a 52 year old woman with limited computer knowledge and a 58 year old man with very little patience for computers, well, you apparently end up with a computer that gets rebooted every other week. Amazingly none of that fried the server itself and I am told it still exists and still chugs along.

What it does not do is share internet access, which sort of defeats the fundamental purpose of the thing. Myself now being 2,944 miles from the computer (that's what Google Maps tells me) makes it a bit difficult to do tech support, and so my advice was to buy a router.

So that went well but it turns out that that machine also hosted its own DNS (both primary and secondary servers), which of course spells disaster when it is not connected to the internet. However Mike, of not myself fame was already hosting my blog to begin with and offered to pick up the DNS of vect.org. So now this site actually works and will probably continue to work. If you used any other vect.org services (and I know one or two people who read this may be curious) they probably won't be back in the immediate future, though I do have a spare computer that I had initially planned to be a vect.org replacement (and then some sort of media/gaming computer, and then sort of a waste of space) and it may yet fulfill its destiny.

In other news I said goodbye to Verizon for the first time ever and said hello to AT&T after I was tempted by the magic of the iPhone and its "whole internet". This is actually the very first Apple product I've owned, and it's pretty slick to say the least. I recommend it (or the iPod Touch if you have no need for a phone) to anyone who likes to have a single device dominate their life. For example you don't ever need to know where you are going when you have one... or how to get there. Also if you ever wanted to get your e-mail whenever you wanted (for example I just took the dog out to the bathroom and read my latest Google Alert) and never ever have any downtime from it, well, there you go. Granted many people already did that prior to the iPhone, but not in such a stylish way. Also having played around with Blackberries and Windows Mobile phones I will also put it out there that the iPhone's UI is far, far better.

And that's all I have to say about that.

So, Google Chrome is out. Google's shot at making their very own browser. It's an interesting take on a browser. I'm actually using it right now on my laptop which is a 1.73GHz Celeron M with 1GB of memory because it's a bit faster than Firefox 3 and seems to, on average, use less memory.

As a browser it's surprisingly minimalist. It takes the Safari route by not using the OS look and feel for the application. When I first checked out Safari for Windows I was annoyed by that, but I've since softened. My favorite media player is still Winamp, and generally any other media player has its own skin. In fact I strangely prefer it when they do; media players such as Foobar or VLC look like ass. So thinking about why a browser would annoy me but a media player does not... I don't know. Maybe years of using Steam have taken their toll, but Chrome's non-standard look has entirely failed to bother me.

Anyway aside from being a magical blue thing that sort of reminds me of XP's horrible default theme the UI is amazingly minimalistic. There's the usual minimize, maximize and close buttons in the upper right, but there's no title bar or brazen display of the application name. Indeed only a very tiny 'Google' appears next to the buttons on the right when the window is not maximized. When maximized the browser makes maximum use of space, with only tabs and the address bar filling up non- web site real estate. No border and no title bar at all.

The options are few. You can view history and downloads only in their own tabs (as opposed to the sidebar most browsers use), and there are some minor settings you can change, but nothing is really customizable. It's the essence of a browser, really. There's no extra stuff. No insane security settings, no extensions, no custom buttons or adjusting the size or order of the interface elements. Even the status bar at the bottom only shows up when it needs to and takes up the least amount of space necessary before quickly fading back away.

Another argument entirely is if or not this is a good thing. There are arguments for both sides, obviously, but regardless of that Google was successful in building something that's purely web browser and nothing more.

Perhaps the most compelling thing about Chrome, however (at least to web developers such as myself) is the new Javascript engine, V8. The thing is incredibly fast. It's sort of hard to figure out how fast it is first-hand since most web sites have their Javascript fairly optimized. I came across this Javascript test which essentially just runs a bunch of fairly common JS functions 1 million times each. While by no means any sort of official benchmark, it's a pretty good gauge of how quickly browsers run JS. At work I have a bunch of browsers installed so I ran it through each one with these results:

Chrome: 37ms
Firefox 3: 223ms
Firefox 2: 587ms
Opera: 261ms
Safari: 254ms
IE6: 705m

I don't have IE7 installed on my work machine, but I would think it as well as IE8 would put up similarly sad numbers to IE6. IE also limits runaway scripts by the number of times a loop iterates rather than execution time of the script (or actually what seems like a combination), which causes a large number of errors to display when you try and execute those scripts. While there's a marked improvement from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, Chrome clearly blows everything else out of the water. In fact Chrome is able to execute 1 million parseInt functions (probably the most intensive Javascript function) in less time than the average of all those functions in any other browser.

As if this wasn't exciting enough news, Firefox 3.1 (due out sometime later this year) will have its very own Javascript engine rewrite called 'TraceMonkey' (a name I find hilarious). Not only that but developer benchmark comparisons show TraceMonkey is up to 1.28 times faster than V8. Now of course this is only a couple of milliseconds we're talking about (29ms compared to 37ms, for example), but it's still impressive. Not only that but both of these engines are (or will be) open source, meaning other browsers can pick them up. I don't expect Internet Explorer to start using TraceMonkey or V8 any time soon, but Opera and Safari picking up one or the other certainly couldn't hurt.

I guess, really, what this comes down to, is that the browser market is finally moving somewhere again. There was a huge stagnation period where nothing was really better than IE6. Mozilla was the only real competition, but most people felt that was too bloated. Firefox (or Phoenix as it was called back then) aimed to change that by removing all excess stuff from Mozilla and eventually it paid off. During the period of Firefox's rise there wasn't really any actual competition and it consisted entirely of Firefox chipping away at IE6's market share. Slowly. Very slowly.

And then recently (within the last two years or so) there was a resurgence. Opera stopped charging for their browser, Microsoft finally released a new version of IE (though IE7 is sort of the WindowsME of Internet Explorers) and has another one in the pipeline. Safari was released for Windows, and now Google, champions of the entire internet, have their own browser. It's about as exciting as browsers can get. There's competition in the browser market again, and that's never a bad thing for anyone.

If you happened to be here since Firefox 3's release you may have seen the sidebar pushed all the way to the bottom below the content. Firefox 3 seems to have modified the behavior of left/right floating divs so that every so often divs that aligned correctly in not only Firefox 2 but every other major browser suddenly did not. I don't know why exactly, but adding a wrapper div fixed it. Also, as if it weren't obvious, I decided to change the design again because I was sick of the last one already. This one is much better. Fun fact: it's the first design for this blog to use more than one image. The way of the future.

I seldom use the 'article' feature of my blog because I never have much that can't be stuck into a standard update. However, I feel that I finally have a story that may be at least partially worthy of this feature. Behold, A Tale of Two E-Mails! It's a story of uh, some guy who thought that my e-mail address was his for a couple months. I shit you not. Check it!

A recent thread on Shacknews posed the question of favorite gaming moments. To me this is a pretty interesting list or concept, because it removes lists of what usually encapsulate entire games and brings it down to sections or moments of games which, as a whole, may not be as excellent as some individual moments.

Due to the list being full of spoilers for games you may or may not have played, I'm going to put the article a click away.

So here's an amusing anecdote:

Marmite is a genius

After me saying about being unable to get a copy of GTAIV, he sent the "preorder phone text" to my mobile for me to try and get a copy.

So on the way home I walked into a game, showed the text and said "I've just got the message about my preorder, I've been unable to find my receipt though" to which they responded "You must be Greg Stephens, you're the last one to get your preorder", to which I replied "Yes, yes I am"

So I now have my copy of GTA IV, because Marmite is AWESOME.

From this Shacknews comment. Greg Stephens of Nottingham, UK is gonna be pissed!

Stories like these always warm my heart:

Which may be why Montgomery looked at himself — a 45-year-old former marine with a reddish mustache, bulging gut, and disappearing hair — and decided to become someone else. That person, he wrote on Dynabrade stationery that he stored in his toolbox at work, would be an 18-year-old marine named Tommy. He would be a black belt in karate, with bullet scars on his left shoulder and right leg, thick red hair, and impressive dimensions (6'2", 190 pounds, and a "9" dick"). Emboldened by his new identity, Montgomery logged onto Pogo in the spring of 2005 and met TalHotBlondbig50 — a 17-year-old from West Virginia, whose name, he later learned, was Jessica.

For the full bizarre story (and trust me that paragraph is only the tip of the iceberg), check out the article on Wired (it's many months old, but it's new to me!)

Stuff White People Like may just be the greatest web site in the long and storied history of the Internetweb. Hilarious and even awesomely painful at times, I don't think you will find a better collection of suggestions with which to ensnare and catch your very own white person.