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It's true. I was arm wrestling a friend. He wasn't a hulk or anything and I held my ground against him for several seconds before he slowly started to win. Then I gave it one last intense push to see if I could turn the tides... and my arm broke. Spiral fracture of the humerus. Not sure if stretching beforehand would have helped, but yes, you can damage your body with your own strength. That is, my physics understanding is that since our arms were barely moving at the time of the break, I probably could have done the same thing against a brick wall.

Yes, I got checked out for bone density afterwards and was healthy.

He buys me a beer whenever we hang out :)

I'm going to plug my little non-partisan politics page that features substantial interviews with each of the candidates. There is an interesting crop of people to choose from this time, moreso than in the past couple elections, it seems. Or maybe it's just because the stakes seem so much higher now?

I'll refrain from my opinion.

Cheers.

I actually don't really understand our obsession with "hits". There are good indie games out there for anyone who wants to look, and there are indie developers making a living off their games, as far as I can tell. I recently had a ball playing Darwinia, and Rag Doll Kung Fu.

I've made games, movies, and music, and I think it's just about artists and audiences getting over their obsession with being a big hit and dominating the world. Many of my favorite things are smaller scale things that touched me personally, and would not necessarily appeal to the mass market. And I think that's okay.

On the consoles it is far more limited, but I feel that is just an issue of openness. I mean, there wasn't much indie music on minidisc either. But the music in other formats exists, and games on the PC or online exist, and anyone with the talent and skills can still make something cool. And if they can't dominate the world and make millions like EA or Sony... oh well. I still appreciate it.

Cheers.

Hell, I'm such a PINE evangalist I'll give out my URL:

        java ssh client

Feel free to copy the HTML and Java to your own server. Then you can ssh/PINE from any web browser. It's like gmail but it's PINE!

Cheers :)

They're there now.
This one is just too awesome. I hope you got a mention in the credits for Carmageddon. That was clearly a direct ripoff with some fancied up graphics ;-)

You know, that's an interesting point that I hadn't thought of but it's obvious in hindsight. I'm a 32 year old Nintendo fan with disposable income. I'm a lot more interested in playing youthful games like Mario and Zelda that have great design than GTA and other "mature" games that are actually aimed at kids who are still thrilled by random violence and high polygon counts. No offense intended, I was one of those kids 16 years ago. In fact I even coded a couple ultra-violent games on my C64 back then. No polygons, though :)

But yeah, people like me are probably a better market. And I could care less what kind of horsepower it has. As long as it has good games I'm in. Nintendo must understand this at some level.

Cheers.

Oh, and since I actually wanted a counter for myself and FastCounter sucked, I wrote a simple one later. Completely unrelated code -- just a minimalist counter. Some might find it useful.

Cheers.

Back in the day, I was hacking away with my Commodore 64 while enjoying a tall glass of milk. On the floor next to my desk was a large open disk organizer, containing over a hundred 5 1/4 inch disks. This collection represented years of pirating (who said that!) and at least as much time game writing. Backups? Sure -- all in the same box.

Anyways, an errant elbow movement sends the glass of milk careening into the disk organizer and just about every disk is saturated. I may have actually cried.

But then was the cool part: I could not accept that my life was over, so I decided to fix the disks. Over the course of a week I cut open every disk jacket, took out the actual magnetic diskette, and washed them gently by hand. I then put them back into a clean, freshly cut jacket and tried them out.

All but one disk survived this process. (A commercial copy of Ultima III).

Try that with today's floppies!

Cheers.

I loved my C64 back in the day (even wrote some games for it back in the day (scroll all the way down)). I also did some 3D stuff on the Amiga 4000 with the video toaster. There really was a lot of fun to be had on those machines.

But it kind of makes my skin crawl that a group of completely unrelated people are marketing completely unrelated stuff under the commodore name. I don't know exactly why it bothers me, but it does. Maybe because it's such a blatant attempt at manipulation?

I don't know. But I sure loved the machines and software back in the day.

Cheers.

I'd blame the slow JVM startup time for that one.

And the fact that less than half of the time I let the JVM start up, the applet just crashed or behaved erratically anyways.

I'm not down on Java. I even made a goofy Java game. But regardlesss of whose fault it was, I think "Java" and "Browser lockup" became nearly synonymous.

Cheers.

Now if they can just make a decent cross-platform runtime. Or let me compile it into a binary so I don't have to depend on whatever they've got or send them the whole runtime myself.

Or something like that. I really enjoyed my personal java project, but when I tried to do anything more advanced I just ran into such cross platform garbage that I couldn't see straight. I ended up using OpenGL instead.

I still have some long term hope for Java, though.

Cheers.

Whoops -- only one "S" :) If you want a demo of the sound quality, here are a couple songs I recently recorded:

Talk To You

Why We Are

Pardon my lousy singing -- but it shows just how cheaply you can get hi-fi these days.

Cheers.

Whoops -- only one "S" :) If you want a demo of the sound quality, here are a couple songs I recently recorded:

Talk To You

Why We Are

Pardon my lousy singing -- but it shows just how cheaply you can get hi-fi these days.

Cheers.

I made some games for the C64 under the name "Blud Red" -- about halfway down the page. You can download them and play them on a decent emulator as I recently pulled them onto my PC to relive the fun. The games more or less suck, but man were they fun to make.

I loved my C64. It was a big part of my life from ages 14 to 18 or so. It's how I learned to "hack" or "code" -- or whatever it is I get paid for these days. It was so limited that you had to use real creativity to milk fun out of it. It was more fun coding that thing than the superpower machines I work with now...

I did have some fun writing a java applet video game (on that same page) which I sort of limited to a C64 level of complexity.

Cheers.

I've been working on an online multiplayer game on and off for the past year. It's not playable yet, and it's not flashy, but I think it could be interesting. Email me if you want :)

I've been working on an online multiplayer game on and off for the past year. It's not playable yet, and it's not flashy, but I think it could be interesting. Email me if you want :)