I found a chipmunk!

====this is another blog entry for my English class's "mandatory 2x/week blogging" assignment====

I hate to venture into the realm of politics, just because it's such a controversial subject and I know that many of you may not care to much about it because all the candidates appear the same to you, however I feel like complaining a bit about this "$700 Billon Bailout" plan that failed, was revised, and just now OK'd in the senate. Even if you don't care much about which candidate is the better one, or have strong feelings one way or another, because this is an issue that directly relates to the economy of this country (which will effect us in the future if it doesn't already), it should be something you care about.

First of all, I grew up in a blue state (Massachusetts) in a liberal family with liberal relatives, then moved to another blue state (Washington) to study at a very liberal school (Digipen) that should help us enter a very liberal industry (the video game industry), so naturally I am a very liberal person and will be voting for Obama come November. Now, I really don't like the $700B Bailout that both Obama and McCain supported and voted for, and from the looks of it most Americans disagreed with this type of extreme measure too. In such a divided race, why would both candidates agree on an issue that is not supported by such a large amount of their voters? I do not know the reasoning behind it, because it doesn't seem like much of a political stunt when both candidates do the same thing. Anyway that's not the point, I just want to bitch about how stupid spending $700 billion is right now.

Part of the bailout plan is to increase FDIC insurance from $100,000 per account to $250,000 per account. Now, in this time of financial crisis, whoever has more than $100,000 sitting in a bank account isn't doing too bad for themselves right now, so naturally this increase insurance is only going to apply for the people that weren't having any major problems to begin with. There's also the issue that it is not the smartest thing to have over 100k sitting in a bank account in the first place. If you have expendable income like that, you should invest it or place it into safe securities. I know the economy is bad and all, but there are safe ways to invest in this time of crisis (I am not an investor so I don't know what to invest in). Either way you look at it, this element of the bailout only helps the people that don't need the help to begin with (unless you think having to settle for the 100 inch plasma instead of the 120 inch plasma means they need help).

I'm sure the bank CEOs were afraid that they were going to have to skip the next model of Ferrari and stick with their old outdated 2008 models for another year because they banks were failing. I bet they were happy to hear about this bailout package. No need to worry anymore, you can afford your 2009 model and probably even the 2010 model preorder too, all at the expense of the hard working American middle class.

Taxes are a good thing generally. You can't have government services without taxes, and so much of what makes society work (public schools, roads, communication systems, research) is partially or completely funded by the government. I don't mind government spending when it's something worthwhile. The $10 billion per day that's being pumped into iraq is definitely not a worthwhile use of tax dollars. Why should we spend so much money to blow the brains out of some random middle eastern country that was no threat to us (we never found WMDs remember, there was no definitive proof in the beginning either) when that same amount of money could be spent funding research to find cures for deadly diseases or find a cleaner energy source or make public education actually worthwhile (that in itself is a whole different rant I need to write). You know, stuff that helps the world become a better place.

The $700B bailout isn't going to help anything or anyone besides the CEOs of the banks the money is going to help. What about everyone else who lost their jobs or their houses or their cars or their belongings? Is anything being done for them? Why should we help CEOs when there are so many more average folk who need help. I guess all that's left for them is escapism through booze and video games (and guess who's going to be earning a living through making video games in the near future. Yup, it's not all bad for me it looks like, especially because people will give up eating before they give up playing video games. But it's not about me, otherwise I'd be no better a person than the senators that voted to OK this stupid bill).

What does blog even stand for anyway? Wikipedia says (cause wikipedia is always right) that it stands for Web Log. I hate when acronyms pick letters arbitrarily out of their words just so it sounds cooler. Like let's take my full name for instance, Tyler Jude Glaiel. Let's see here... sure my initials could just be TJG or something boring like that, but from now on my initials are LUDGE.. see Tyler Jude Glaiel. Whatever.

I have nothing to write about even though I'm being forced to write, so I'm letting my mind spew it's excrement all over the screen again and hoping something comprehensible comes out of it. I mean, I have a lot I could talk about but don't really care to make too much of it public knowledge (for now. I'll wait till I'm old and write my life stories in a book like all old people do, only it'll be about 400 pages on why the good old days were so much better than you kids and your techno mumbo jumbo). Damn there goes my ability to think straight, cause I'm tired and my stomach hurts for some reason (maybe it was the coffee machine that refused my money and wanted exact change).

I'm not making much sense am I. Ok I'll talk about my English teacher, who I know is going to give me an A on this forced blogging assignment because I am doing so well on it with the ramblings and the incomprehensible thought excrement and overuse of the word excrement (it has so many uses) and the horrible grammar and whatnot. Nobody's judging you so don't judge me, reader. Anyway I think our English teacher is just trying to get us to argue for the sake of arguing cause today's class didn't help too much in learning anything. Actually we don't learn too much anyway, we just tend to sit and argue at each other. Most of the time I actively engage in the arguments but with sarcastic peanut-gallery comments meant to lighten the mood rather than being serious.

When you argue with someone you have to have some comic relief or you'll end up hating the person you're arguing with and getting all steamed up over something where the confusion only arises because our english teacher makes the topic so vague that you end up with one half arguing the equivalent of "Apples are red" while the other side argues "A basketball is round", and I'm sure that this long run on messed up in the head sentence makes sense to everyone who has the pleasure of reading this long run on messed up in the head journal entry of mine, which I am typing right now, at this very moment in time.

That previous paragraph is one sentence and it's awesome and I have officially run out of brain goo for this very weird entry. Thank you and goodnight.

Forced blogging kinda sucks when you have nothing to talk about. Anyway I skipped one entry last week, and waited till saturday to write this one. I guess I'll make up for it by writing a few extra next week. Anyway the hard part is thing up topics to write about, especially since I've exhausted the things I can complain about (not really, but I've exhausted the stuff I can complain about without doing research so I don't sound like a dultz). Well let's try to use the next topic as a prompt. Community. Hmm, do I have anything to say about community?

Nope.

Ok so that covers that. I bought Megaman 9 yesterday. Megaman in all his 8-bit (but made in '08) glory. And it owns me. It's just as hard as all the old Megaman games and a bit unfair in places too. It took me so many tries just to beat the 8 robot masters, and now the "hard" part of the game begins. It's killing me. Definitely worth the $10.

I bought more food on Amazon Fresh this week. That service rocks. I've been here for about 2 months and I haven't had to go shopping for groceries cause Amazon will deliver it to me with free shipping. Anyway I had a problem with milk. You always need milk, for cereal and drinking and coffee creamer when you run out of half and half, but I don't really drink it that much, and it goes bad quickly and a gallon of it costs almost as much as a gallon of gas. So I found a solution. Soy Milk. It comes in a smaller container, it's about the same price per gallon, and, best of all, it doesn't need to be refrigerated once opened. It also lasts longer than regular milk when opened, and tastes a little bit sweeter and nuttier. It's not a perfect replacement, but it's a good enough drink for me. And I have half and half too for coffee and mac and cheese. But I'm a fan, and anyone who has never tried it should. Don't expect it to taste like milk though, it's different and good in its own way.

I fear I'm turning into a vegetarian hippie. I was raised on organic health food so the foundation is there, and I have family who are vegetarians and whenever I was with them we had to eat all sorts of interesting vegetable dishes. The problem is, I like meat way too much to go vegetarian, but that doesn't mean I can't have a lot of vegetables in my diet.

I should exercise more. The weight room at my apartment complex has 3 machines, but they al don't adjust very well to tall people, so I have to sit awkwardly at them and I don't get to use the full range of motion so it doesn't really help me much. What I really need is a few weights next to my desk that I can lift while I'm not doing anything else. Unfortunately that means either A.) biking to the store, buying them, then biking home (uphill for a few miles) with 40 pounds of weights in my backpack or B.) ordering them online then paying $100 for shipping and handling. I'll just wait till my dad comes up and have him drive me to the store to get that and other things I need such as a water filter, a microwave (this is a big one), and more sponges.

Well it looks like my brain just relieved itself all over the computer screen, so I'd say it's time to end this blog post.

Time to write another journal entry. What to write about hmm.... I'm not in a very ranty mood right now so while I do mean to complain about things like corporate public relations or public education or how annoying Project Fun was today (actually that's a good topic, maybe I'll just cover that), I don't have it in me to write about pet peeves right now. So I'll just write about Project Fun I guess.

For those of you reading this who don't go to Digipen, Project Fun is basically the training program that they make us work with for the first semester of school, because we can't work in raw c++ like most games use because we are still learning c++ (although it seems like most people in the class have at least played around with it before, or know the basics). So, we get to use the monstrosity that my school dubs "Project Fun" to learn the basics of making games (something that I taught myself throughout high school using flash and stuff). Frankly, it's not so fun.

First of all, to put into perspective what this program does, we have a ball and a wall. If we want the ball to fall, we click an "add gravity" box. Then we click a "collide with wall" box. They we draw lines on the ball and wall to show what the objects shape is so they can collide. Bam, movement. It seems so simple but it really isn't. The program is littered with glitches and shoddy collision detection and an overly complicated interface. Telling a ball to collide with a wall is one thing, but not having control over what happens when the ball collides is another. It does so much stuff for you that it makes customizing it to make it do what you want a real pain.

We had to make Pong today. It was so painful. We had to plop some code in about 45 different places in the file (we did get to code a little but since it was all in the editor we still didn't have much control over how we coded). This took about 2 hours to get Pong working right, after dealing with problems such as the program breaking code that it wouldn't allow me to manually fix because it was "advanced" and out of the scope of the project (had to redo that whole part) and setting up complicated state machines to control the movement of the ball (which really doesn't need a state machine).

So many times I said it would be so much easier to just code everything from scratch, because Pong does not need an advanced physics engine, accurate collision detection and complicated state machines to work properly. I know, I've done pong before. It's a lot easier than tabbing through hundreds of menus to get to the spot where you can add 4 lines of code (which are calls to weird ProjectFun specific functions that we're going to have to learn then never use again after this semester's project class is over) before searching through a maze of trees to find the spot where you get to add 3 more lines of code. It's a pain to say the least.

Anyway one of the interesting things they told us in game class is that we have to play games if we want to be able to make games. So my homework is pretty much... play video games (I laugh at my friends who have stuff like 'biology' or 'english' homework... even though this technically is english homework... whatever). School for games rocks! We get to spend countless hours programming in c and c++ giving a long set of basic commands to the computer to get it to do something more complicated, then spend hours doing math and physics to get basic movement to look right. Then in our tiny bit of free time we are forced to play video games. Oh it's so painful.

Just kidding! The workload hasn't picked up yet (except in math), so my college career has been a lot of math, programming, and super smash bros. And forced blogging in english. I'll let you know how it is in a month when we have no more time to do anything besides school (at least that's what I keep hearing).

(See previous post for explanations on these journal entries)

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I will now rant about piracy. Ranting is pretty fun, because when you complain on the internet nobody really listens, so it's a good way to complain about things you have no real chance to fix. Then again, if people do read, then I have a chance to convince them that my opinion is the right one. So really, there's no way to lose. At least I'm not ranting about minor details like the labeling on packages of food or how crappy some obscure NES game that nobody ever played is. Anyway on with the rant!

People pirate music and games and movies and books and anything else that can be easily represented in a digital form (everything). It's a know fact. It's been mainstream ever since the introduction of the internet. Some people support it, some people complain about it, but everyone is guilty. I don't support piracy, but there's a much deeper meaning than simply "it takes money away from the creators". Frankly, they make enough off of the games they sell anyway so it's not the main issue. The problem is that companies are always trying ways to prevent piracy, with DRM and other , shadier techniques.

One of these techniques is that companies will start to recoup lost funds by selling advertising space in their games. So far it's mostly ads on billboards and product placement, but it has the potential to become like movies and force people to watch previews and commercials for 5 minutes before the game even loads. It's happened on the internet a lot already, and it's most likely on its way to full games too. In fact, with enough ads, companies could potentially make their games free and reach out to a much wider audience ( = more money from advertising) and allow anyone to download and play their game. Sounds good right? Free games? Right?

It's not good. Think about it. If the game's main source of income is the advertisements, then the companies advertising effectively have major control over what goes into the content of the game, not the players. When we buy games for $50, we have a say in what goes into the game, because the companies need to make games that we are willing to spend money on. We are their main source of income. Now if advertisers become the main source of income, and we have no reason not to try a game when it comes out, there goes the developer's motive to please the player. They already got their money from the advertiser, what do they need us for?

Mythbusters is a popular TV show. I recently saw an interview where one of those guys said that they had to pull an episode abut exposing the flaws in RFID chips because the heads of the credit card companies threatened to pull their advertising if they aired it. So, they pulled the episode. Is that really what you want to happen to games? Do you want some big company to force delays in releasing a game to fix up something that could show an image of that company in bad light? All the sudden an industry who's business was once "appeal to the player so he'll buy the game so we can get money" now becomes "appeal to the advertisers so we can get money".

Not only will this be bad for the players, but it will be bad for the independent developers too. If free games become the standard, then you have to prove that you can distribute your game well before you get advertisers. So, what advertiser would spend money to place an ad in the game of a small, unheard of company with no prior record whose potential audience is only 1/100th that of Guitar Hero or Grand Theft Auto? No sane advertiser would. That leaves one option to the small developer: put a price tag on the game. However, in a world where free games become the standard, then nobody will be willing to pay money for a game anymore. There goes all the indie developers.

And it gets worse. Companies will still try to leech money off of you either way. So even with ads, they might still try to get you to pay for the game. This has the same consequences as before, but with the added con of having to pay to get the ads shoved into your face in the first place. Granted, this is a little better for indie developers, but it still sucks for the consumer.

Think before you pirate. Free stuff might seem cool at first, but in the end the companies will make their profits, and the consumers and pirates are the ones who lose. By the way, I have done absolutely no research, so this entire rant is pretty much one stream of thoughts and bickering and speculation. It gives you something to think about though.

I have to write a journal entry (in the form of a blog) twice a week for english class, and I decided to post them here. I wrote and posted these a few days ago, but I think it can't hurt to put them on newgrounds also.

Entry 1

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Seeing as the first section of the book is about identity, what better way to write about identity than to just write whatever I feel like writing, showing who I actually am and expressing my opinion on things. I will be writing 2 entries a week for this whole semester, so anyone visiting this site who doesn't really know who I am should get a good picture of me by the time this ordeal is over.

In this first entry, I feel like writing about music and how it relates to games. In game class at school (which I feel, until we get to the projects, is the most useless class so far), they made the point that music is usually tacked on to games at the end, and is rarely an element that is woven into the the game from the beginning. I understand, but frankly I think it's a shame. Music has the ability to transform the mood of a game, sometimes even more than graphics can. It's the same thing with movies too. Look at Star Wars. That movie wouldn't have been nearly as good it if weren't for it's amazing soundtrack. However, games allow for a much more unique use of music than movies, and it's disappointing that so very few games have managed to create unique uses of music.

Many games have memorable, fitting soundtracks, but it's really tough to come up with a game that has a memorable, fitting soundtrack AND uses that music in a different way than simply playing it in the background, then playing a new song in a new area. In a game, the characters are interactive and dynamic, the graphics have become interactive and dynamic, the stories are on their way to becoming interactive and dynamic, but music has remained pretty static. There's a few games that stand out though. Braid is an amazing example. The music ties into the theme very nicely. The time control mechanic actually controls fast forwarding and rewinding background music too, which was an extremely nice touch. It's not a hard thing to implement by any means, but the problem is that so few companies care enough about music to put the effort into designing ways to work the music into the gameplay, and would rather just tack it on at the end.

If you noticed, my latest flash game makes an interesting use of the music by changing tracks on different planets, but all the tracks are part of the same song, so by playing through the game, you basically assemble this song together, turning it from a calming simple empty-feeling background track to a much busier but still emotional pile of sounds. And this brings me to my next point.

I don't want to put the work into the sound only to have people turn it off with a mute button and listen to their rap or metal or emo music. It'd be like trying to play a game with the window minimized and watching a movie instead of looking at the game's built in graphics. The music is a major part of a game, and I really don't think people should be able to opt out of experiencing it (no offense to the deaf). Some people are accustomed to listening to their own tracks simply because the music in most games is simply tacked on, so it makes no real difference whether or not they swap out tracks. However, in a game where the music is a central feature (for example, Guitar Hero or Rock band to be obvious), people really should listen to the music the game provides for them.

I don't like putting mute buttons into my games, but most of the time I do it because people want it. Well, in my latest one, I decided from the beginning that I was not going to add a mute button into the game. I felt that the music was such an important feature to the game that adding a mute button would essentially kill the experience. I want the player to experience the game a certain way, and the music is part of it. I care what fans have to say, in fact I really want suggestions for Aether. But as far as I'm concerned, you can comment on the music, but don't tell me that it needs a mute button, cause you won't get it. If you really don't want sound, turn your speakers off, but you are only depriving yourself, just as if you watched a movie on mute.

Aether

Ok for some this might not be too new (a week old is still new), but it's new to newgrounds!

This is a neat little arty depressing game that I made with edmund. Or is it depressing? There's a lot to the themes of this game that are left open to interpretation. But there's a few things that are set and whatever nobody here cares about themes and whatnot but you can't blame me for thinking that maybe some of you might be interested... oop... anyone... ok... wait... no... you can if you want.

Anyway it's a pretty different game from what I've done before, and has a story too! None of my games ever have stories! Don't worry that was edmund's writing (I just did the code and the music and some design). Well now, you should all go try it, cause if you don't, then I will virtually shake an angry fist at you for not trying it.

Enjoy!

Not the one I mentioned earlier that I'm working on with the Swain, this is my other project that was previously unmentioned. And it will remain unmentioned until it's released. VERY VERY SOON!

P.S. I start school soon. VERY VERY SOON! Like orientation's tomorrow and classes begin September 2nd. Looking forward to it.

EVERYONE ENJOY THEMSELVES PLEASE. FOR ME. I COMMAND YOU.

Oh, no I'm not releasing a new game today but thanks for asking.
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but.... I do have a game in development right now. It's not screenshot worthy yet cause there's no real art (You can blame The Swain for taking on a ton of projects at once). Is it demo worthy? Yes. My graphics are crude but they function at least. Do you wanna see a demo? Well I can't do that.

The programing is about 1/4th done, which makes for the first quarter of the game playable. The game is familiar and unique at the same time. It's not a sequel though, nor is it a spiritual sequel. Genre? Well if I could answer that I would.

I'm sure you'll all enjoy the game though, it should be a nice fresh experience.

Oh and this is the name of the game, if it means anything to you:

Dorgamir