Meaningless Existence Belongs To Me And To Me Only...

7:27AM

Top 5 Christmas Films

10:25PM - New post

Star Trek XI: Where No Lens Flare Has Gone Before

8:18PM - retro action baby!

11:27PM

New blog post: Transformers: The Revenge of Michael Bay

8:49PM - FUCK YOU RBS!!!!!

Aww yeah!!

10:53PM - The f word

Is mostly for poshy twats!

Especially when the winners are always the non family based, venison cooking snobby gimps!

And this week it looks like the Northern Corner snobs won it for manchester.

Bastards.

And I bet their food isn't as good as I place I know that do amazing oriental food!

1:21PM - game programming stuff

Currently, while surviving this morning's hangover from last night I'm doing more pixel art stuffs for the ET remake.

I was intending to try and do a Halloween themed flash game but I couldn't think of a way to do the platform levels, so it is being put on hold till next year. The game concept is below:


Jack, the Night watchman - halloween flash game.

Player plays Jack who carries a Jack O'Lantern.

Monsters: Skeletons, witches, vampires, mummy's, bats, ghosts, spiders
Harmful objects: cobwebs, disembodied hands, zombies (can be shot but will never die), dripping slime

Being in Limbo Jack is looking for a place to stay, however, he cannot go to hell or heaven. He carries a lantern made of a pumpkin that allows him to fire offensive spells. These spells drain the power of the Hell Fire, given to him by the devil to light his way, and he has to restore it by killing the hell demons. If he runs out of the Hell Fire, the place goes dark and it's game over.

The Devil, still prevented from taking Jack into hell, decides on Halloween, to capture the residents of a quaint Irish town as revenge for his loss.

Jack must now prove his worth by killing the denziens of hell and rescuing the villagers.


However, Christmas is coming up so I have enough time to draft a flash game for that. I was thinking of a Winter Games styled game with Christmassy characters. I also will be starting on my game competition soon, when I get a copy of Zombies!!! as the theme is board games this year, it'll be written in GLBasic.

Tonight is more D&D (Drinking and Debauchery) as I'm off out to a friends birthday and jillies.

12:15PM - Game 09

Went smoothly, well Qin did. Got 3 players again this year, thanks to one DM not turning up to his Dark Heresy game, and modified the story thanks to seeing Tremors 3 and playing Gun (PS2). Sunday was more quieter and no one turned up for the Star Wars game, even though people were asking about it. So, instead, I jumped into a mates Bullet Dodgers game! :)

11:32PM

I'm either stressed or something, but I feel uneasy about the Qin game tomorrow. It's been a year since I last run it, and although successful, I feel that it may be lacking something, so I may have to adlib and hope for the best.

As for Star Trek, well I really wanted to but I'm not running it as I didn't finish writing it up - got too distracted with other things. I'm just going to run it for Vague as a one off (one of the members wants me to run it anyway).

6:11PM - Robber status

There isn't going to be another Robber update till next week as I have Game '09 GM duties, coupled with rewriting The Road To Mayfair, rescuing the E.T. remake and general websiteyness. I actually have a blog on my website now, I just need to add individual links to each entries and a security OO php code so that I can add comments.

I've got two confirmed games this year, Qin: The Warring States and Star Wars Saga Edition, I just need to finish writing up Star Trek and get it confirmed.

11:29PM - Robber update

I've added linux and mac os builds to Robber, dunno if they work.

Robber

3:16PM - W00T!! - My first remake

...well part of, and one you can actually play!

This is a remake of the Spectrum game Robber

It is written in GLBasic and will be ported over to Linux/Mac OS X/GP2X/GP2X WIZ/iPhone etc when it is finished (unless you ask really nicely, then I'll port it over to your choice platform)

The object of the game (the first screen) is to get the stethoscope, door key and safe key and get to the exit without being caught by the torch beam.

The rest of the screens (2 more after the first one) are currently being written.



Get your download here:
Robber Remake for Win32

Play nice! :)

3:08PM - I hate jobsearching....

...I really do!

Not long ago I phoned a Director of a company for a Trainee Web Developer who wanted:

Previous experience required or online examples. Must have knowledge of HTML, GSS (which I am assuming is a misprint and should be CSS!), Java script and actionscript would be advantageous.

So I phoned, gave him an example of my website (which now has the blog set up) and started giving him spiel about how I did it. Then I get

Him: This isn't the page I'm looking at!

Me: Oh, describe the page?

Him: "Cloud Computing is like Jade Goody. Most of the masses are suckered into the idea, and are as ignorant as the idea itself"

Me: Oh, that's the comic page

I wouldn't mind but I gave him nothing else but the main domain which redirects you to the blog and he considers himself "highly technical" and was only interested in Actionscript/Flash. If that was the case, he could have said that he was flicking through my website, but he didn't.

I did try convincing him that I could do the work but the moron was adamant that I wasn't the man for the job, hell he didn't ask me for my CV ffs!!

I love it when "directors" talk highly of themselves, especially when they think Flash/Actionscript is the holy fucking mecca.

Oh well, his loss not mine. Just another lucky escape for me!

11:11PM

Years ago I came up with a theory based on the works on Einstein and Hawking to come up with the answer to the creation of the universe.

I haven't thought about it much but just a moment ago I watched Master of the Universe on 4oD about Hawking and his theories. Watching it just clicked something in my head about the theory and a possible answer to why the universe now has such a weak gravitational force. Here is an extract from an e-letter I'm typing to someone about it:

But this means that the dismissed notion that a blackhole has infinite gravity around the singularity has to be included for it to work.

Both Stephen Hawking and Eintsein were correct, and if you join up their theories (and dismiss String theory - which, I'm not a big fan of) and again include the fact that there is infinite gravity around the singularity, this infinite gravity becomes the superforce that Hawking postulated. An odd assumption considering the world we live in today. However, in a lot of ways, it turns physics on its head as it is supposed to in a blackhole, where time doesn't exist and the laws of physics "breakdown".

Now, if you recall, I proposed that the beginning of the universe happened when two blackholes, and subsequently the singularities, collided. When that happens, Hawking postulated that as much as 50% of the mass of the blackhole is lost. If you remember the equation:

gravity = weight / mass

Now take 50% of the mass away and that conversely effects the gravity making the gravity not infinite anymore. Hence, bye bye superforce, hello weak gravitational force. That coupled with the dark energy makes gravity be on the loosing side! Mind you, I wonder if the negative energy of the vacuum fluctuations behind Hawking Radiation is the dark matter/energy we are seeing that is causing the anti-gravity effect. These particles do have negative mass which means that they possibly have negative gravity and it shows evidence that again Hawking was correct and we are living in a blackhole....just a thought.

This is going to look weird and wrong in one sense, yet strangely fitting and correct in others.

I do have plans to teach myself astrophysics/maths and finish this book, it's just going to take a while. But it's nice to know that the answer was already there staring us in the face. We just have to look at things from a different perspective!

8:38PM

Soooo, since walking out of my last job....and trying to get deserved JSA (even though they hate giving it, no matter HOW honest you are), I've managed to secure a volunteer job with a start-up company and I've also signed a sub-contractor zero hour, web app job with another company.

I didn't leave empty handed either. I have a contact with the remote worker I was learning SEO with.

We also have a cat (long story) - pictures to follow soon.

The house is taking it's time to be done, since the builders come and go, but we now have a kitchen and a working oven. When the time comes, that microwave is going to be relegated into the corner and IGNORED for a looooonnnngggg while (microwave meals == yuk!).

5:04PM

I turn 27 tomorrow.

3 years left till I'm 30.

Fuck.

12:07AM

I finally walked out of my job today.

I've had enough!

Having a boss that punches walls, avoids paying ANYTHING (if he can help it), doesn't pay NI or holdiays and other general shittyness just doesn't help.

In other news, I updated my website to change the old old old error page into something more amusing - but it still needs a small tweak:

error page

The hex stuff is actually a converted string that says stupendous-stuff.com

iGeek++

9:45PM

I can't wait till my boss goes on holiday next week.

6 weeks of peace and quiet.

And none of his bad temper (like smashing a cisco device over his head when it didn't work, punching walls and throwing items around).

Still, at least we get to wind up sales people who ring up! - must try my "beowulf cluster of Amstrad PCW 8256's" story....

9:21AM - ET: The remake...continued

I spent some time of last night coding, mostly in Java, to make some SEO tools for my job (plus if others find it useful, it also means that I can add it as a download).

The other coding was back with the above title. The character movement routines are in, the "bounding box" - which prevents the player from moving outside specified bounds - is in, the initial holes for the game are there and I'm currently looking at the collision detection.

I've been um-ing and ah-ing over whether to start a series called "Confessions of a game programmer" whereby I break down the code, of each game, and explain exactly what is going on. I finally decided, this morning, that I was going to do this and my first article will be posted online AND come as a PDF with ET (since that's the first game that is going to be finished). This should help those that want to do game programming or those that are interested generally. I'm also going to be doing the same for my game programming related reverse-engineering projects!

If I have the time tonight, which I didn't yesterday, I'll do an update to Gamers.

10:48PM

Meeting the Oliver Twins was great - as was seeing plushy again.

They have so much energy, you can see why the Dizzy series was so successful!



Here I am playing Ultimate's Jetpac (unfortunatly the "Grizzy Adams" look is being downsized as when eating food, tasting beard is not really nice!)



My pixel art and I'm still not happy with it!!! I'm supposed to base my art on space invaders and come up with something alien-y.