Topic: Daily Drip
Another Saturday & it's time for the weekly grounds.
Spring has FINALLY appeared around me as temperatures are between the 60's & 80's (getting up to the mid-80's on April Fool's Day). There's still traces of snow around as it's just the piles that were moved with all the sand crap that was used to deice the streets or in specifically isolated areas that are fairly well-shaded. However, it's nice that I can finally put the winter jacket away until October / November... but I'm just being optimistic that there won't be a freak blizzard striking.
As far as work is going, I'm still liquidating my brains on submissions on a daily basis. I still have 8.5 pages in my old workbook (comprising of 198 submissions) to burn through. It's not exactly the content of the submissions that are brain-numbing, it's the repetition involved as the variations submitted have an ABSOLUTE NO PAUSING rule on them. So if the player pauses during the attempt, it's automatically disqualfied until the player retries it... hence the repetition. I totally understand why the players are repeating themselves, having the same desire for perfection on certain games. It's just having to sift through 15 minutes of crap to reach the 3 minutes of gold.
As this week also had April Fool's Day, it was time to face the inevitable barrage of April Fool's Jokes. I actually ran into a few before April Fool's Day with the You Don't Know Jack series as I had to re-make all my Game Jackal profiles after a disasterous upgrade attempt. The YDKJ games ALWAYS checks your system's clock to give you a timely opener the first time you play it today as a way to keep the gameplay experience fresh. Multiply that about 7 or 8 times in one night & the joke tends to get a bit old.
This year's April Fool's Day Jokes online were a bit amusing. Think Geek's joke items were mostly professional, but a few were a little on the weak side. However, with Think Geek's track record, one of those joke items will actually become a reality. My bets would be "My First Bacon" plushie, a kiddie-toy that's geek-inspired by the bacon crazy, & the Screaming Knife, which is a knife that plays a recorded scream (or one of several pre-recorded screams, like cows, pigs & chickens). The Screaming Knife is more of a novelty thing that would fit part of their macabre subculture with the Psycho shower curtain, "The Ex" Knife holder & the "Dead Fred" pen holder. I'm actually placing the safe bet on "My First Bacon" as it likely carries more appeal.
Google got into the April Fool's Festivities by temporarily changing their name to "Topeka" for some strange reason. On YouTube, they provided "TEXTp" as a video resolution, which rendered the videos in moving, colored ASCII-art. While it was done totally as a joke, it was one that scored points for artistic design. While actual live videos didn't look flattering as ASCII-art, some videogame clips came out surprisingly FANTASTIC. While I'm not a fan of ASCII-art, mostly because where I run into it does nothing but wastes space, I can appreciate a work of art when I see it.
There were of course some late April Fool's crap... but I'm not going to bother blogging about it. To go Kotaku to find all that crap out.
The website is still a standstill as I don't have a lot of free time to develop the webpages, only the blog at this time. However, I'm toying with an idea of creating a "Bard's Battle Axe" for Dungeons & Dragons, which would be a musical instrument AND a weapon. Designed as a masterwork lute (or guitar-like instrument) that's made of ironwood (to increase strength of the instrument without losing the warmth of wood) that has a retractable blade (or two) so they can be hidden in a civil setting, but can surprise an attacker.
HOWEVER, upon doing a little quick research in the DnD books, the creation aspect is plagued with some technical pitfalls. First of all, it would have to be made out of darkwood to cut the weight of the instrument. Second, it would have to get a Druid to cast the Ironwood spell (to give it the strength of steel, but also adds to the weight), followed by a Wizard / Sorcerer to cast the Permamancy Spell on it. Then the masterwork creator would have to slip in a secret axe blade (or blades) to complete the item. It's just an idea I'm toying with, but I'll try to overcome the problems before publicizing the exact details.
On a final note, I'm pleasantly surprised that the person (or people) working on GamePro's twitter feed actually started following me. While I'm not a reader of their magazine nor their website (as I usually get my gaming information from IGN & Kotaku), I added them to my following list as a mutual measure of professional courtesy. Pretty much the main reason why I haven't keep up with GamePro is mostly due to some bad press I heard as a teen with their magazine during the Pre-Internet era. I'll likely check them out when I have some free time, but it'll just take time to patch up things.
That's all for this week's Weekly Grounds... unless there's something interesting that come up later, see you next Saturday!
