About a week ago, I had to tear down my office and put my computer in the corner of my bedroom while we had some work done on our house.
It wasn't a bad week using my iPad Pro as my sole connection to work/games, but I'm happy to finally have the desktop set up again. That was a long week!
Yesterday, Twitter was bought out by a private investor - or at least, it's in the process of being bought out right now - and I'm outta there so fast I'm leaving a Marty-shaped hole in the wall.
I've never really liked Twitter, honestly. It's not a bad platform, from a feature perspective, but I have never liked the short-form text format for expressing thoughts.
I can't have been the only one because over the years, Twitter expanded its Tweet size from the original 140 characters (designed for texting in a pre-smartphone era) to 280. Eventually, they added the ability to link together/post multiple Tweets at once, so you could more easily write something much longer. But the platform still encouraged you to distill your thoughts down to something bite-sized, and I just don't think that's good for having real, interesting interactions with people. I never have.
Ads became a more prevalent part of the experience over time as well, with every Nth Tweet a promotional message. Then a bunch of grifting losers flooded the platform trying to hawk bad products, bad people, etc. The scourge of NFT clowns and lying, political hacks twisted Twitter from a sometimes interesting and intimate experience to something rotten and awful.
I had a few fun moments connecting with people I already knew in person and from other platforms, and I saw (and shared!) lots of cool art there. But engagement with people I care about really fell off a cliff over the last few years, and watching the company be acquired by someone who doesn't seem to have any interest in the things that made old Twitter fun and useful is enough for me.
I've been kind of wanting to do another month-long art project for a while, but every time I start one it immediately begins feeling like a burden every day.
It's weird, because when I'm actually doing the work, I'm in the creative zone and genuinely enjoying myself. But the brainstorming leading up to each piece - especially on days that are busy - can give me low-level anxiety.
So March begins tomorrow and I might just start a new project. We'll see how I'm feeling then, I guess!
Now what am I supposed to do with myself - draw for fun?
Well, yes, of course. But I have to take a small break. Chalk It Up 2021 is coming up soon too, so that'll be my next thing for now!
So I'm finally getting a new phone, and taking the plunge and getting a smart phone, no less. I'm replacing my old LG Chocolate with an HTC Trophy, which as I am typing this, is currently riding shotgun with some anonymous FedEx driver, getting ready for glorious times ahead with Marty.
In case you're not up on your phones, the HTC Trophy is a Windows Phone 7 phone. I tried out the iPhone 4, and though I like my iPod Touch, I just can't get that far in with Apple at this point, and it annoys me that everyone has them. I also tried a handful of Android phones, and while I liked some of the features they offered, it all seemed a little janky. I think I'm just kind of tired of thumbing through pages of tiny icons.
Finally, I tried out Windows Phone 7, and frankly, I like it. It's different, but not pointlessly so. It's got a sharp look, and it's all simply coherent and snappy. Also, since I had an upgrade coming from Verizon, and since they were doing some kind of online promotion, I got the new phone for only $50. This is my golden parachute for if it doesn't work out, but I have high hopes for it and don't expect that to happen.
But before you get all huffy and start hammering out a comment on why I should have gotten Phone X instead, let's share a moment reflecting on the things I won't be missing about my old LG Chocolate. If we can't love the same thing, let's hate the same thing, alright?
Visually, the shiny navigation wheel on the face of the Chocolate is actually interesting. It makes the phone look like it will be fun to use and lends it a foreign air of functionality. You don't know what the wheel does or how it would feel to use it, but you suspect that it makes things easy, and that there might be many hidden uses to that wheel that your mind couldn't possibly have imagined. The wheel even gives the phone a retro-iPod look.
Sadly, the wheel is not awesome. Not even remotely. Instead of being a touch-based input, like the iPod of old that it pays homage to, or even the other four buttons on the face of the phone, this wheel is exactly that: a wheel. It's a piece of shiny plastic that your thumb has to actually rotate to work, and it's not easy to find the right place between way-too-sensitive and turning-the-wheel-around-three-times-to-get-the-menu-to-move-ahead-one-item.
When the phone is unlocked but no menus are invoked, the wheel also has the added benefit of opening the useless calendar widget. This widget does nothing but show the current date and time, which you could have already seen on the home screen behind it, and it runs poorly to boot. So poorly, in fact, that if you accidentally leave the widget open for long enough for the phone to lock again, it stops actually telling the time, freezes up, and then the phone actually takes a minute or two to close it later when you realize what happened. As you might imagine, this is loads of fun when you're trying to make a call quickly or you just want to see what time it is.
Or more precisely, the spell-checking dictionary auto-add feature, which is impossible to access. Though there aren't that many words that aren't in the dictionary by default, occasionally you have to enter your own words in the LG Chocolate 2, which isn't all that painful an experience; you just put the phone in a different text entry mode, type the word, and then continue your text. When you do this, the phone adds your new word to its internal dictionary. So far so good. Later on, when you use the word again, it's easy to use because the phone will help you fill it in automatically.
Unfortunately, the auto-add feature isn't particularly smart, so there are many instances where you don't want it to add something, because you're not going to type it all the time, but it goes ahead and does it anyway. Further, it remembers capital letters and treats periods and commas as part of words, so if you are using a word for the first time at the beginning or end of a sentence, the dictionary entry for that word will always be that way.
There also doesn't seem to be a weighting system for how often you use words, so for example (and this is the one I hate the absolute most), one time I pressed the buttons 9, 6, 8, 1 to type out the number "968y" with a comma at the end. Now, every time I type the word "you", (also 9, 6, 8) and then add a period to the end (1), the Chocolate 2 replaces my perfectly ended sentence with "986,". Nevermind the fact that I've typed 9, 6, 8, 1 hundreds of times now, and only once have I ever wanted it to be "968,". It suggests this to me every time. And so far as I can tell, there's no official way for going in and deleting the entry from the phone's internal dictionary.
If LG added this feature to the phone to make me want to throw it as far as I possibly can every time it happens, then let me be the first to say that they did a fine job of it. A damn fine job.
I think this one was probably a sign that my time with my LG Chocolate 2 was drawing to a rapid close, but a few months ago I was furiously texting, and I felt something odd happen beneath my left thumb. The hitherto solid, mostly immovable, and always reliable 4 key finally decided it was time to abandon ship, severed its bonds with the glowing rubbery button below, and ungracefully fell to the floor below. Since then, it's been weird typing words that use the letters g, h, or i.
I don't blame 4 for finally giving up. I don't really even text that often, but I probably would have fell off the Chocolate 2 long ago, if I were 4. I'm proud of him for sticking around as long as he did.
Over the course of the last half year or so, my Chocolate 2 has become increasingly unwilling to send out my text messages, sometimes making me cancel the text and try to send it two or three times before it works.
It's an annoying problem, and it's made worse by the fact that one often doesn't watch his phone after pressing the Send button to make sure the text actually gets sent - it's assumed that it is, the phone is locked and put away, and the Text Messenger goes on his merry way. Quite often I respond very quickly to texts, only to find out an hour or so later that my efforts at fast text turnaround were in vain; the message did not actually go through, and the person expecting a response is now pissed off, and/or wondering what happened to me. If I want to snub someone by not responding to their text, I'd rather do it on my terms, than have my phone decide for me when such snubbing is appropriate. Especially since my phone does not seem to be good at making these kinds of decisions.
I'm hoping this isn't a problem with Verizon itself, but nobody else I know who has Verizon has this problem, so... there you go. I think this problem might actually stem from my dropping the phone a few times during its years of service, but hey, then it's a design/engineering problem. Still not my fault. Things that are my fault wouldn't fit well in this list of faults anyway, now would they?
Maybe it's called Qualcomm BREW, or maybe it doesn't even have a name. Regardless, I'm calling it Crap OS because it's a crappy operating system. From the aforementioned calendar widget issue to the many times where I haven't been able to delete messages from the phone (because the inbox got too full... that makes sense, right?), I've experienced a lot of annoyances with this OS.
About the only thing I like about Crap OS is that it's generally simple, and since Verizon seems to have it on all of their non-smart phones, it makes it easy to pick up and use virtually any of those phones, once you know your way around. My phone also had a few themes to change the feel of the OS, and they actually worked pretty well too, I will say. Still, I don't think I'm going to be lamenting the upgrade any time soon.
Let me close this list by saying that, despite my ranting here, I actually don't hate the LG Chocolate. It has many flaws, like just about any phone. But it served me well.
Anyway, that's the long and short of it. A new phone is on the way, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'll report back here (and elsewhere, I'm sure) when I get it. Anyone else out there have an HTC Trophy?
Just a small update here. Wanted to let everyone who might not have known that I'm not dead, and haven't entirely forgotten about this blog yet, hehe.
It's been a while since I've updated the blog software though, so I'm going to do that, and will probably revert back to a default theme for the time being to make sure there aren't any odd incompatibilities between what's up now and the newer version of WordPress. I was a bit sick of the old look anyway.
Thanks for bearing with me here, if you've been checking in. Will be back later on with a more detailed report on what the hell I've been up to!
Continuing my string of posts about things that I wanted to talk about during my hiatus, following is a list of stuff that happened in the world of video games that I found interesting or noteworthy. And addictive. Horribly, horribly addictive.
A couple of months ago I was browsing Reddit, and I happened upon a submission about a game in its Alpha phase that people were absolutely salivating over. I posted a comment about how I'd never buy a game in Alpha, because it's bound to be bug-ridden or possibly never even finished. I was ridiculed, but held fast to my opinion.
A few days later I was lurking around Reddit again and looking through my message log. I found my anti-Alpha post, and since I was bored, decided I'd check out the game's website and possibly give it a try, if a demo was available.
That game, of course, was Minecraft.
And nothing, not even a lengthy stint with World of Warcraft, could have possibly prepared me for the vise that slowly wrapped itself around me as I loaded up the free, browser-based client and started playing around with it.
I moved around the game world. I liked the blockiness of it. Then I clicked and accidentally removed a block. Amazed, I did this several more times, and then figured out how to make blocks. Looking at the vast landscape generated before me, I quickly realized that this was a game with almost limitless possibilities.
I spent the next hour or so building a massive tower with a door in the back that led to an underground tunnel. Building was easy with infinite blocks and no enemies around.
Curious to learn more about this game, I checked out the feature set for the single player for-pay Alpha client. The prospect of building massive structures with limited or mined resources sounded daunting, but I wanted more, so I quickly made the payment, took a quick moment to note my hypocritical nature, and then plunged into a gaming obsession that lasted for weeks.
By day, I dreamed up new and unusual ideas for structures to build, and by night, I built them. I went from putting in a good deal of Team Fortress 2 almost every night to putting in a ton of Minecraft, exclusively. I created a modest safe house, a massive network of mines, a two way mine cart system that went deep underground and underwater, a huge lighthouse, a giant stone skull carved into a mountain, and the beginnings of a second home, an underground lair with trees and deep shafts carved into the hillside above for light. I even crafted a replica of Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin. Yes, I played a ton of Minecraft.
But then I just grew tired of it. I still had my massive plans for construction, and still had plenty of inspiration from the official Minecraft forums and Minecraft's home on Reddit. But I'd log in and I just didn't want to spend hours and hours mining all that stone, moving mountains, and chopping wood. To put it in short, I ran it into the ground.
I'm still looking forward to the October update, since it includes so much cool new stuff... but I'm otherwise pretty much over it. I've got too many other games that I haven't put much time in with yet, and I need to get them out of the way to make room for the holidays.
A lot of other Game Maker-related events have happened since I last blogged, as well.
Another big development over the last few months is that I am now an admin at the Game Maker Community forum.
Following the sudden retirement of longtime community leader KC LC, the GMC needed admins. Chronic, who was pretty much the sole active admin after KC LC's retirement, needed help. Xot and I talked with YoYo Games' Kirsty Scott about this, and within a few days we were given promotions. We've both previously served as global moderators, and earlier, simply moderators. And I'd also like to think that we both bring something fresh to the community's leadership.
I guess it all sounds a bit silly when you write it out. But I am happy to be a part of the community, and glad that YoYo Games trusts many of us enough to help guide the forum into the future.
Speaking of the future, a lot more information has come to light recently (and over the period of time where I didn't update the blog) on the continued development of Game Maker's runner.
At the beginning of the summer, we were shown a copy of Skydiver running on PSP, and much more recently, we've seen Madness Madness Madness running on an iPod and Skydiver on iPad. It's an impressive feat, and I look forward to seeing where it leads for Game Maker users.
The PSP runner wasn't as impressive to me, simply because I knew that even if they did work out all the kinks, it would never truly be easy to release GM-made games on the platform. There are simply too many hoops to jump through. For that reason alone, the iOS runner seems much more promising to me. I hope that I might get a chance to help push out some games for it early on, depending on how YoYo Games plans on publishing user-created content.
I still hate saying "iOS" out loud though. Eye-oh-ess. Does not roll off the tongue.
Oh, and I've also been really happy with all the information Mike Dailly (YYG) has been posting on his blog about the development of upcoming Game Maker releases. It's been a good read, and I like that someone so experienced is heading up that project.
A much smaller blip on the radar was the Discovery Competition entry me and some buddies (Matt "Lethalanvas" Griffin and David Perritte) were working on. It took off at tremendous pace, and then we all got a little too busy and we stopped working on it.
Originally, we wanted to keep it a secret, so there wouldn't be much hype about it if we didn't finish (good thing, right?), but now I figure we might as well show off what we've done.
Basically, it's a game about a ninja assassin type guy who's lost his memory and who wants to stop the world from collapsing around him. It features a robust platform engine, coupled a ton of slick animations by yours truly, which lets you run, slide, grapple ledges, swing from ceilings, and eventually a lot more. The gist of it was to create a story-driven platforming experience that gave players a lot of difference challenges at once, so they could work on levels in whatever order they liked, to an extent, depending on their skill level.
If we can all find the time, I wouldn't mind working on it again sometime next year, actually. We all put a lot of work into it, and although there isn't much to do in the game right now, there is a lot of stuff that we have done, including a written story, an awesome platforming engine, some killer graphics and animation, and some cool tunes. I don't want to see it go to waste.
I'll try to get a demo or something up eventually. Like I said, we don't have much of the actual gameplay hammered out yet, but it's fun to play around with.
I haven't been able to keep my blog up as often as I've wanted lately because I've been busy with lots of different things in both personal and professional capacities.
My girlfriend and I are looking at buying a house soon, and as you'd expect, it's a complicated process. We've been spending months combing through home listings online and going to view them in person at open houses or with our Realtor. We've been spending the rest of the time sorting through the details of lenders, the finances, taxes, and so on. My girlfriend has done much more than I have, and I still find it extremely exhausting.
It'll be great, at the end of all this, to go home to a house instead of an apartment, however, and that keeps me going through all the extra work.
I've also been busy with website jobs. I've been contracted to work on a site for a friend of my girlfriend's uncle's son, and it is in the second revision now. Unfortunately, my laptop hard drive broke (again!) and my working files are all lost, until I have time to plug the drive into my desktop computer to see if I can recover any of it. Normally this wouldn't be much of an issue for a website, because I've usually got an online copy floating around somewhere, but this site needed a Flash element built in, and I never upload FLA files, so I'm probably going to have to rebuild it. Not fun.
I'm also working on a revision to the look of my buddy Andrew's website, noLove Skateboarding. It's coming along really nicely, but because of the increased activity in the aforementioned house hunt, I haven't been able to put as much time into it lately as I would like. "Not enough time in the day" seems to be a recurring theme for me these days.
By the way, the new site isn't live yet, so if you visit the link above, brace yourself for our original janky design.
On the upside, one of the other projects I've been involved with for noLove (putting my tree painting onto a skateboard), has finally come to fruition - and I even have one of them in my possession now! All things considered, the final product looks pretty nice, and after taking an impromptu trip to one of the local skate shops, I think the art stands out a lot more than a lot of the generic crap out there.
You can buy a noLove tree deck from my buddy Andrew. Drop him a line on Facebook or Twitter.
So, it's been a while since my last blog post, eh?
Well, let's ignore the fact that this seems to be a recurring theme here at Marty Blog lately, and do a bit of catching up. A lot has happened since the last time I posted anything here, and as always, I've got a lot to say about things.
Rather than putting it all in one big topic that nobody wants to read, I'm going to write up a series of posts in (what I hope will be) rapid succession that cover everything and make my blog even beefier, simultaneously.
Sound good? I hope so! Stay on the lookout for updates in the coming hours/days!