Focus is intense, but short lived

http://apps.facebook.com/pdg-feed-the-fish/

As usually, I’ve switched what I’m doing again.

Facebook is primarily filled with pointless diversions, much like television, podcasts, the internet in general, and all of the other various forms of mass media.

So I decided to contribute with Feed The Fish!

I originally started out with an idea to make the simplest, most inane, pointless, fluffy “game” I could.

Text based virtual pet fish was the best I could come up with.

I started it out with simply feeding your fish, and having the fish die or starve depending on the amount and frequency of the feeding.  The fish are theoretically immortal (although due to limitations with PHP, living past the year 9999 will be something of a problem).  As the fish corpses pile up, this is tracked and reported to the player.

After showing it to my wife, she had a couple of ideas to refine and improve the game.

I will mention the ones that I have already put into the game.

First, I had no indicator as to when the fish was last fed.  This has been fixed.  Previously, the only way of knowing the status of your fish was to overfeed it slightly until the description of the fish changed.

Also, one can now name any new fish, although I realize now that I have no way of letting the player name the initial fish, so I’ll need to fix that.

I personally have overfed 8 fish, mostly to test the various code paths.

Javascript is written in  an especially convoluted mix of FBML, HTML, Javascript, php, using Ajax and JSON.  It is also especially un-secure, so for future things I’m starting to look into FBJS.

At this point, I’m attempting to do a couple of things with FTF:

1. get to five users on  facebook, so that I can submit to the directory(currently have 4, only need 1 more)

2. get some cheesy art for the icons and in-game fish status visuals (my wife has volunteered)

I aspire to be a counter-culter game artist, who deliberately writes awful games and gamelike applications in order to point out the futility and stupidness of writing awful game and gamelike applications.

Either that, or I just write awful games.

That’s part of the beauty… no one can really tell the difference!

Status Update 4/20/2009

Today back up to 339.

Strange business.

Of course the weekend has non-routine food, and  additionally there was a non-routine amount of it.

Status Update 4/17/2009

Today 336 lbs, 0.5 down from yesterday.

I have re-learned an important fact: do not drink 64 oz. of water after going home from work, unless the goal is to get up a half-dozen times during the night.

Decided to start taking pictures of my gardening effort, for a record of what I learn.  These photos may be found in my facebook profile, so apparently Facebook is useful for something afterall.

This weekend, there is a great deal of work to be done around the house.

Games Without Penalties

I lately took up playing EA My Sims Kingdom on the Wii.

After playing a while, I realize that there are no failure conditions, and no way to “lose”.

Which is really quite consitent with other Sims type games, as well as the game Animal Crossing, which I have played from time to time.

The term “Game” has expanded over the few decades to mean more than something that I would strictly call a game versus a software toy, so the argument of “is it a game if it doesn’t have a failure condition” does not apply or is completely semantic.  I used to have discussions like that a lot.

If anything, I would simply qualify the application of the term Game for My Sims Kingdom to a “Sandbox Game”, where everything is safe, and there really aren’t any losers.

And so I got to thinking about games in general, and my games specifically, and whether or not they fall into the Sandbox category or not.

In the days of arcades and space invaders and frogger and the like, games tended not to have a “You Win” condition, and simply kept making things more and more difficult until you fell into a failure condition and lost.

This was because the main reasons that these arcade machines existed was for people to pump quarters into them.  They earned revenue, so the faster a player would die, the better of a revenue generator it was.

And once the transition to the home occurred with the various primitive game consoles like the 2600 and so on, this pattern was duplicated, but typically had some sort of difficulty setting to add challenge once a player got decent at the game.

Some games did have a “win” condition, and getting to the end on a single set of 3 lives or whatever wasn’t very feasible, so the concept of a “retry” was added, where you continue from where you were, but your score is reset to zero.

The first sandbox game that I played was Sim City (the original), which was equivalent to playing with interactive software legos.  I also played Colonization at that time, which still had a lose condition.

Most games now I’ve notice initially start with severely filtered content, and the rest of it has to be “unlocked” by going through particular milestones, which is a fine way to bottleneck a player.

And I do like that online high score lists and merit badge systems give a mega-game aspect to things.

In my own games, the most popular one (Pipes!) is a sandbox game. There is no time limit. You can’t lose.

One of the plus sides of the sandbox games is that you can pick it up and set it back down pretty easily.  In a shooter, you can’t simply walk away from it, or whatever awful things you are shooting will quickly kill you.

That’s why they have a pause feature.

It is not a matter of which one is better or worse, or whatever.

And I don’t think it is really a matter of casual games versus hardcore games, either, since in Hamquest there is a very real possibility of getting your character killed, but you can at any time get up and go do the dishes, and return to exactly the same spot, since it is turn based.  Hamquest is casual, but not a sandbox.

Just something I was thinking about.

Today’s Liquid Schedule

Today, the following liquid schedule will be adhered to:

Before leaving for work: 16oz of coffee

At work in the morning: 16 oz tea, 32 oz water

At lunch: 12 oz diet coke

After lunch at work: 16 oz tea, 32 oz water

After going home: 12 oz diet coke, and as much water as I feel like drinking

Why?

I’m trying to control a lot of things, and caffeine intake is one of them.

I need to get back to exercise, but cannot due to tendonitis.  It is feeling a lot better, but I’m resting it the rest of the week, as I pushed it too hard last saturday.  My normal exercise is the treadmill, so that’s going to be out until Monday.

I struggle greatly with food intake and caffeine intake.

I like food.

A lot.

And when given half an opportunity, I eat way too much of it.

Yes, I know I’m not supposed to.

But today I had an encouraging scale experience.  For the first time since starting out, my weight (pre-eating, pre-drinking, and post-purging) was under 340#.

So, I’m going to do my best to control eating today, and drink lots of fluids.

In other news, there are now fresh fruits at my job.  They were dismal yesterday, so I wrote another haiku.  Apparently haiku can work as a protest.

Yep, I Murdered My Lettuce

I either drowned it, or I let it stay in the sun too long on Saturday.

Once, the slim tendrils of lettuce seedlings reached towards heaven.

Now, small sickly tendrils of lettuce lay on the dirt.

Perhaps I should make a haiku,

Speaking of haikus….

At my job there is a “health consciousness” effort which consists of fresh fruit delivered to the various break areas each day.

I happened to see the fruit last week.

It was in various early forms of decay.  Engineers do not want fruit, apparently.

However, this fruit had a sign near it, indicating how it was not free (they have an honor box in which you put your 75 cents)

They also sent out an email about a month ago indicating that less than half of the fruit taken had been paid for.

So, I wrote a haiku:

“I wanted to buy/a fruit that was not rotten./I could not find one.”

I taped it up near the rotting fruit.

It lasted about three hours before someone took it down.

The fruit disappeared as well.

And Now To Completely Bore You With Mundane Life

In  the last month, I went on vacation to Arkansas.  I went to Rogers, AR and Glencoe, AR with my wife.  We needed to get away for a bit.

During the trip, we went to a couple of antique shops and some other cool places.

I’m not really one for antiques, but they had some old books that I picked up for super cheap.  I especially have enjoyed a high school history book written in 1931 called “modern history”.  It really tells me much more about the time in which is was written than the history itself.

We stayed with relatives and friends in the area, and in this way managed to spent $0 on hotels (beat THAT, Hattan!)

However, the day after I got back, my heel was hurting, and I do not recall injuring it by jarring it or kicking anything.

It turned out to be tendonitis of the achilles heel. As I am finding out, this particular tendonitis is rather insidious.

After immobilizing it for a couple of days, I wound up with a flare-up of gout in the same foot.  I had been popping ibuprofen, but I was quickly becoming nearly immune, and I didn’t want to cause any further havoc on my stomach or liver, so I went to the doctor and got a different anti-inflammatory and vicadin for the night (the pain had been keeping me from a good night’s sleep).

So, by last saturday, it was feeling OK, and I had a yard project to do: cut down a pear tree (no partridges were harmed) which was half dead due to an ant colony.

My friend Rick was over, and we took it down and started to burn some of it.  I also had a lot of cardboard to use as kindling, since much of the wood was still pretty green.

I still have quite a bit of pear wood left to burn.

However, I managed to aggravate my tendonitis, and so Sunday was painful, and I was laid up and playing a Wii game(MySims Kingdom, which is cute and pointless).

Next week is burning more pear wood, which should be slightly drier, even though it will rain between now and then. I may need to tarp over the wood.

And then it is railroad ties and dirt to make a garden box.  I’ve already got my compost pile going, albeit slowly, as I cant get out there with my foot as it is.  I started some plants in some seed starters (green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers).  The lettuce did well initially, but I think it has mostly died. I’m new to gardening, so I’m learning a number of things the hard way.

Fortunately, garden starting is an inexpensive thing to be bad at, and composting was almost free (I did have to buy some rabbit fencing to make a ring to keep the pile shaped, but other than that, it hasn’t cost anything, and it has reduced the amount of garbage I generate, so good.

For now, I’m sort of taking a break from doing computer stuff.  I’m trying to expand my horizons.

I also learned that I have “Facebook Fatigue”, and that I had Facebook Fatigue the very day I signed up for an account.  Other than make a couple of games for it, and a comment here or there, I don’t really participate in the community.  I think this has to do with the fact that early on, I was an AOLer (in version 1.5 during the late bronze age), and later I was an IRCer, and then an ICQer.  I’ve apparently become moderately immune to the “addiction” to online communities, because I’ve been in several of them in the past.

It reminds me, actually, of the time I tried playing maplestory.

I had once been a fan of Diablo, and so when Diablo II came out, I got it immediately and began playing.

Then I spotted the pattern: trudge trudge kill kill pick up pick up trudge trudge identify identify sell sell buy buy trudge trudge repeat

In Maplestory, it was the same thing. However, the multiplayer aspect of it gave it a social aspect, which I wasn’t really interested in (because I was already facebook fatigued even before the term was coined).

So, I got my maplestory character to about level 20, got tired of the trudge trudge, and quit.  I’ve attempted to pick it up once or twice when bored, but I just can’t keep going for very long.

There’s no really good way to really wrap this up and finish it, so:

God loves you.

Jesus is Lord.

(Go ahead and be offended if you want)