terror in a onesie

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Pirate pickup lines.

Which of Jon and Kate’s octuplets you’d like to be.

That one YouTube video that is unbelievably cute.

Tinted avatars as political activism.

Movie titles that are unintentionally creepy when muttered by Christopher Walken.

Robot sexual positions.

The YouTube video involving Keyboard Cat playing off that one unbelievably cute YouTube video.

Things that, when eaten, pass through the digestive system unchanged.

How Twitter is dying, nuh-uh is not, is too.

Any other suggestions?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Sunday night, for the first time in far too long, I ran a game of Paranoia.

Paranoia, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, is an RPG originally published in the 1980s. It was an unholy union of Brave New World, 1984, and the Three Stooges. Players took on the role of Troubleshooters, hapless people in a futuristic underground complex run by the Computer, who is helpful yet insane, and who is entirely obsessed with rooting out traitors. As you might imagine, it finds a whole lot of traitors, especially since the players are given every reason to mistrust each other.

How’d it go? Towards the end of the night, a player managed to catch his one-ton power armor on fire. The fire broke through to the power unit, at which point the player managed to hit the explosive bolts, turning one giant exploding exoskeleton into a smaller exploding exoskeleton and many deadly flaming pieces of metal. Another player fired an experimental tangle gun to try to stop the metal, only to discover that the gun didn’t so much shoot sticky strands away from the user as drape those strands about the user. A third had little choice but to activate his experimental rocket boots, which consisted of two boots with twelve rockets each and a belt with twenty-four adjustable sliders, one for each of the rockets, making the whole get-up incredibly fiddly and near-impossible to use.

I don’t run Paranoia games because it gives me the chance to kill players. I run them because it gives me the chance to put tools in the players’ hands and let them kill themselves.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Look what I got!

That’s right, thanks to Misty’s gift, I’ve leapt into the future of 2005. Finally I can play Bioshock on my TV, like God intended.

What’s that, Xbox 360? What do you mean, an interloper?

Oh, him? First-generation Xbox? He’s harmless. I mean, it’s not like he’s really any threat to someone like you, with your –

Kill it? No! That’s crazy talk! That Xbox has served us faithfully. I’m going to send him to a farm in upstate New York, where he can frolic in the fields and –

I won’t do it! I won’t!

Oh, well. It had to be done.

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I admit it: I am in the Facebook, with the Twittering, the different technology that young people are using today. And occasionally we have very geeky conversations there.

Me: Five kids in the house = combinatoric explosion. No wonder interactive fiction authors avoid NPCs.

Glen: I just recently did that problem. Complexity scales as the number of pair interactions, plus a linear term in the number of children. Therefore two kids is three times as complicated as one; three is six times; four is ten times. I think the general formula is 1 + 2 + … + N for N kids.

Oh, and good luck. Having that many rugrats running around is pretty complicated!

Jeff: But aren’t some kids more complicated than others?

Glen: In a word, no. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

For bonus points, should this series have higher-order terms? Why or why not?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I took this at the trade show I attended this week. The booth belonged to a major company, and clearly a lot of money had been spent on it.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Those of you who aren’t part of a more fundamental Christian group may have been spared the sight of what I call flair of the spirit. It’s a subset of Jesus Junk consisting mainly of shirts with retooled corporate logos. The companies peddling these shirts are fond of saying, “Change your shirt and change the world!”, I suppose because saving the cheerleader just led to more problems.

Surprisingly enough, Christian companies haven’t taken the same approach to making videogames. Christian videogames tend to be trivia games or, occasionally, reworked FPSes or real-time strategy games, but they’re never existing franchises with a Christian spin on them. Perhaps this is because making videogames is hard, and companies like Nintendo and EA have hordes of lawyers that would crush a product that went beyond a logo parody.

But what if one brave company decided that the shirt-makers had the right idea? What if one company dared to make Christian videogames that did parody existing ones?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

As Misty will tell you with a sigh, I’m addicted to computer RPGs. Once I start one, I have difficulty doing anything else. Stats fiddling, exploring side quests, juggling inventory and selling off the useless cruft that accumulates — I love it all. In the 1990s I devoured Fallout and Planescape: Torment. I have a special weakness for BioWare’s games. In graduate school two friends and I played Baldur’s Gate II every Saturday for a couple of hours. Even now I’m finally working my way through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Recent BioWare games sort your behavior into two categories, usually Manichaean good-and-evil ones. Last night, as I was selflessly refusing yet another reward for risking my life to rescue someone so I’d increase my goody-goody score, I wondered why it’s structured that way. Why, if you look out for yourself, do you get lumbered with evil points?

In short, where’s my Objectivist CRPG?

Sure, Bioshock played with the Objectivist theme, but I want an all-out Randian game that rewards my rational self-interest. When I refuse to give away the rakghoul serum I’ve recovered, instead choosing to sell it so I have the credits to further my worthy cause, I should be rewarded. When the Jedi order tries to force me to subsume my will to that of their collective, I should be allowed to resist and carve my own path through the universe, protecting my ideas and ideals while respecting the property of others.

Now I just need part ownership in BioWare or Obsidian Entertainment and a good licensed property. Do you think I could get the videogame rights to Atlas Shrugged?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

A while back I had the opportunity to playtest Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, the new RPG from Chad Underkoffler, who created the superhero RPG “Truth and Justice” and the fairytale RPG “Zorcerer of Zo”. The real strength of “Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies” is its setting: a world filled with floating islands, where pulp-style swashbuckling, intrigue, and piracy are the order of the day. S7S uses a lightweight ruleset that makes it easy to pick up and play.

And now you can pre-order a hardcover version, which is extremely shiny. And as with Chad’s other products, you’ll get a PDF to go with the book. If you’ve got a hankering for a good indie RPG, give S7S a try.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

From a gas station restroom in Bald Knob, Arkansas:

I knew “politically (in)correct” had become meaningless terms, but this confirms it. What exactly is a politically incorrect novelty? “Look, honey, this condom makes fun of cripples!”

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Hope you bought your Valentine’s Day cards already!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I Think We’re Alone Now, as made famous by Tiffany.

Overkill, as made famous by Men At Work.

Working in the Coal Mine, as made famous a second time by Devo.

Tarzan Boy, as made famous by Baltimora.

Now don’t you wish you’d heard covers of these songs performed by animatronic animals?

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You can tell someone is a child of the 80s if they make a Gauntlet joke. But you can tell what kind of geek they are by which character they use when they say, for example, “Wizard needs food, badly!”

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

That would be SmoothJazzApprClinic’s on Eli’s review of You Have to Burn The Rope.

“This is not a 4 year old reviewing “You Have to Burn the Rope”. This is a 4 year old being interviewed by someone about “You Have to Burn the Rope”. To me that makes a difference if he puts it his own words, or is being spoonfed/questioned by some adult.”

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

For Christmas today, Eli got a remote controlled car. It was some kind of Dodge, and the package proudly states that it was an official Chrystler licensed product.

Two minutes after I put batteries in it, it stopped working.

On the plus side, we’re now eligible for $10 billion in bailout money.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow USians. As is customary on this day, I will pause and consider what I’m thankful for.

I know: I’m thankful I don’t have any of the turkey fryers that the Underwriters Laboratories got to burst into flames.

Have a safe and non-fire-filled Thanksgiving, everyone.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

A while back I read a great tip on Parent Hacks. They suggested to let your kids fingerpaint in the bathtub and then just take a bath. You contain the mess and the kids. The kids get to have a great time, first painting and then a bonus bath. I decided that we’d try it today since they both have a cold and we haven’t left the house in a couple of days. Here’s the evidence:

Also, a few days back Stephen posted about Andrew’s concert and the prepared piano. Here’s the full set of photos I took of him working on the setup.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve got six graphic design projects going right now and most of them are paid work. I’m working on making way too many Christmas and birthday presents.

It is possible that in October I got a little overly ambitious about Christmas. I’ve made it so I’ll be working every night on hand crafts from now until Christmas Eve. It’s fun. I enjoy it. And truthfully I think I’m more productive all the way around when my plate is full. The downside is that I’m so busy I don’t have any stories to tell and I can’t show photos of what I’m working on because everyone I am making presents for reads this blog.

That’s what I’ve been doing. What about you?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

The vet near us updates his sign every month or so to suggest treatments, give general pet advice, or threaten you with free puppies. As of today, he has different statements on either side of that sign.

Side one: Winter is coming. Prepare your pets for the cold.

Side two: Antifreeze will kill your pets!

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Psst, want to play some short text adventures? Each year I organize the yearly Interactive Fiction Competition for text adventures that are playable in 2 hours or less. The competition’s started, and all of the games are available. You’ve got nothing better to do over lunch, right? So download them, play them, and rate them!

And now you know where I’ve been the last several nights.