Have you ever really seen a rainbow?
Have you ever really touched the blue, blue sky?

A hack of the Gargoyle interpreter to add a "Techno Kitten" mode. I've bundled up just the Frotz interpreter alongside the Z-machine port of Colossal Cave Adventure.

You should just be able to drop libgarglk.dll and technokitten.mp3 in with any of Gargoyle's interpreter binaries, and add "technokitten 1" to garglk.ini, to enable Techno Kitten Text Adventure mode with basically any piece of interactive fiction.

I decided to upload it now because I'm going to be without high speed internet for a while. Have a fun Klik of the Month and a merry Klikmas if I don't see you then!

I just can't bring myself to do that.

Now that that's out of the way, I can say that I'm about done with the first, easiest quarter of the project, called "Pretending to have something done."
The next ones will be "Continuing pretending to do something", "Not getting anything done (??????????)", and "Checking if all that pretending did something."

This game is gonna be more like a practice to myself than anything else. The end product might be nothing too impressive; I hope that I will finally start to figure out the cause and the effects of the pretending when I finally have the finished product in my hands.

The reason I can't do anything much when I'm not let to be alone, and trying to force that out of my system for now because it doesn't make any sense for stuff like this.

But again, there may be some stuff there that I genuinely made an effort for and is fun. (AKA went balls-berserk because I remembered this is 75% joke game)

aurrgh now im locking up again.
i hope you get some sense out of that.

next time ill post my old series of purely joke games (which almost got too serious like this)

edit: re: this is some kinda deeper shit to me on a personal level, but don't worry about it; i'm like that all the time.

So over at the Idle Forums, a number of spammers have taken to posting messages apparently created by Markov Chains. Stuff like:

Slummy. was cut thewithered vines display lambast, Author sold it from the root into landing to the Someone Dweller to travelers. "At the time of the circumstances, to opine of it as in the represent. Sell me pose to a Mianhuangjishou the senior. He, whether they essential to do, I ran freshly met said: 'Stretch me a pin!' "He asked how much money each, a bob.

Naturally, I thought it sounded like modern poetry. And naturally, I had to record myself doing interpretive reading of a few of them. Attached are five o'erhasty examples. I also included the original texts in the readme file, for completeness.

They're in OGG format, so download Audacity or something if you have trouble hearing them. Or bug me to encode them into something more common.

I made a game about a guy in a clown suit that has a bomb inside it that will explode if the clown were to stop.

So it's Speed 2 but with a clown instead of a boat.

Made in about 2.5 hours, since I haven't touched KnP in over 10 years, and I apparently forgot everything about it. I didn't know where I should put the file, and I didn't think it would be fair to sneak it in to the next Klik of the Month. Run back and forth and get hamburgers to go faster, and don't get hit by buses.

I had a bit of trouble with the built in movement systems. It seems if the maximum speed for anything goes over 127, the object will freak out and stop in the middle of the screen. Problem is, if you get stuck like that in this game, you immediately lose, since stopping for a split second will kill you.

Uh, yeah. I don't know. Have fun.

Please standby a bit longer while I collect myself together, I'm all over the place (I'm too fukken introvert.)

Play the second one (Original KotM version here)
Also the first one (not too important.)

The final semi-serious work awaits.
A farewell to the old, influenced by both old and new.
Man I wanna move on to new already.
But first lets do this!

So, for the past couple of months, I've been poking at the idea of interactive fiction without a parser. I had a grand idea, years ago, for a graphic adventure game with a comics-based interface. My idea is essentially that the entire story is always available at all times, and that you can make the protagonist do things, or, undo things, at any point in the story. I realized recently that I could bring many of the same ideas to text, which is much quicker to write than comics are to draw.

So I began to build it.

So today, I'm ready to release a little tech demo, for people who might be interested in such things. It doesn't even really demo the tech that well -- I don't use any world state, though the capability is there to do so, and there's not even any branching like Choose Your Own Adventure. The interface is still kind of rough; I definitely haven't worked out all the kinks in deciding when to show which options to the user. I don't even know whether I should be showing or hiding clickable words. (Right now they're hidden because that's the last thing I tried.) Basically, I'm still exploring the idea, but I'm interested in your comments.

Anyway, if you like, you can try it out and tell me what you think. Click on words that are clickable to get a menu of things you can do. Once you've seen everything in the game, maybe you'd be interested in peeking at the story's source code (not the engine's source code) to get a feel for what writing IF in this sort of system might be like.

(recenty entry on my site http://kirkjerk.com/ )

Ever rediscover a half-remembered book from your childhood and realize that it was probably wildly influential on you? Such was the case with David L. Heller and John F. Johnson's "Dr. C. Wacko Presents: Atari BASIC & The Whiz-Bang Miracle Machine". I recently found a good PDF copy at Atari Mania's Page of Atari 8-bit Books

The book was a beginner-level but thorough guide to BASIC programming - I suspect I knew most of it by the time I got my hands on a copy, but it was still very cool. The style can perhaps best be described as "Early Doctor Demento" -- hardly a paragraph goes by without a gag of some kind, but still it seems like it would do a good job of explaining fundamental concepts.

I can even see the book's influence in my own guide to Atari (2600) Programming,
Atari 2600 101. (No cartoons, more's the pity.)


I was reminded of this book when I ordered some Eggs Benedict, and I thought about this chart in it:

Anchovy Burritos:	280 Calories each
Twinkle Cakes:	340 Calories a look
Guacamole Juice:	90 Calories per slurp
Clam Dip:	70 Calories a dip
Greaso Burgers:	470 Calories per bun
Quicko TV Dinner:	400 Calories a tray
Pizza a la Hollandaise Sauce:	900 Calories a sniff

I think that for years that was my main image of Hollandaise, some kind of insane calorie vortex. (I guess I forgot how the other foods needed only a glance...)

Atari Mania also finally let me read the book's -- prequel? It was much more advanced, but came first-- companion, "Dr. C. Wacko's Miracle Guide to Designing and Programming Atari Computer Arcade Games". I'd like to think if I had had this book at the appropriate time, I finally would have gotten those damn "player/missile" graphics and in general made some better games.

This past Halloween I made a "mid-90s Hollywood-style Hacker costume". I looked silly enough with my ex-trendy wardrobe, but it was my Micron GoBook laptop (Windows ME, 64MB Ram, PCMCIA Modem, 3 1/2" Floppy drive, 2Gig internal!) that completed the look. I took screen captures of every UI seen in the film Hackers for reference, and then did additional research into various top-ten lists of improbable and unrealistic hacking in films, to ensure my interface would have that look that makes you wonder if its creator had ever used a computer in their life.

Controls are Space, Enter, Shift, Arrow Keys, Escape, and Keyboard Mashing.

Move over, Crash Override, Acid Burn, Lord Nikon, and Cereal Killer. Here comes Venom Byte!

Hack the Planet!

I'd already got my little brother playing the 529-in-One Pirate Kart, and he enjoyed it as massively as he could considering GameMaker games don't run on his machine. So I then installed KNP onto my brother's computer, told him, and showed him the Level Editor, Event Editor, and so on (but gave him very little guidance other than that).

After a week, I came back and found this.

I thought it needed to be posted, seeing as it's a wonderfully terrible game by a real, actual twelve year old messing around in KNP. Enjoy, or otherwise.

Many geoengineering schemes have been proposed, but all can be reduced to two main strategies: reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (increase the amount of infrared radiation escaping to space) or reduce the amount of solar energy the Earth system absorbs. Two of the most common examples of these geoengineering china travelstrategies involve removing carbon from the atmosphere by adding fertilizer to selected regions of the ocean to increase phytoplankton growth and reflecting more sunlight by injecting tiny, non-absorbing particles (aerosols) into the upper atmosphere (stratosphere).

While both of these geoengineering examples might counter global warming for a time, they could also have significant drawbacks. Increased fertilizers and/or phytoplankton growth could havechina tours unintended consequences on ocean ecosystems, including increased ocean dead zones and toxic blooms. Adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere could modify the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, affecting ozone and thereby having possible unintended impacts on the lower atmosphere.