Nostalgia time.

I was looking at some old files on my computer, and... wow. Some of it I'm not sharing because it's so embarrassingly dumb.
...But I will still show you a few things.
Some of them I think are still interesting, but others are just not quite as embarrassingly dumb as the rest of the stuff.

First, this extremely short stop-motion video that I made about two years ago:

Ah, it's so gruesome....
It's a play-dough alien creature incising larger play-dough alien creature with some sort of sophisticated alien weapon (it's actually the stylus to a PDA or something of that nature).
I'm not sure why, but I believe that is the only stop-motion video I have ever created.
I should do one again some time....
Anyway. I think it's funny because of the surprise ending, but in retrospect it would have been better to exaggerate the scale even more and make the monster start farther back.

Next I wanted to share a piece of writing. The one I ended up picking is not terribly old (it is in fact relatively recent; it's only about a year and a half old), but it's a classic:

I found myself in a much more pleasant room with carpet, lights that were on, and a large, comfortable-looking chair in the middle of the room. There was another door at the back wall. I was about to go and look to see if there was anyone in the chair, but suddenly it spun around, and I saw an extremely thin man sitting there wearing the most peculiar thing on his head. It looked to me like a gigantic orange and yellow sock, but I suppose it may have been some sort of mask that was too big for him. It covered his face entirely except for one hole for his right eye.
“What are you doing here?” he asked furiously.
“I sort of just… walked in.” I replied. “I was following this guy who looked suspicious.”
“Oh. You probably mean Frederick. He always looks suspicious.” The man replied calmly.
“So what you mean is that he’s always carrying guns and/or cases of the sort that usually contain bombs or large quantities of money?”
“I did not say that.”
“Yeah, well he had both.”
“Uh-oh… When did you start following him?”
“Probably about five minutes ago.”
“I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you now.”
“You don’t sound very sorry…” I said.
“I lied.” He replied nastily, pulling a knife from his belt.

That was an excerpt from "Normal, Mostly ...Sometimes", the piece that pretty much made me what I am today.
Not really, but it is an important work nonetheless. It's not unusually funny or interesting, but it defined my style.
Another reason I posted this is because it made me think of my old LJ blog. ("Normal, Mostly ...Sometimes" was the prequel to a strangely written "story" I did for that blog, you see. Incidentally, that was the last post I ever made.)
I'm not going to give you the URL to that (major, major kudos to anyone who still remembers it), and I'm afraid of looking at it too much myself because it will probably make me want to take it down. But I guess I'll drag out something for you to read.
A, here is a post from nearly two years ago (so, yes, around the same time I did the animation up at the top there) called "There was a title, but thens it ranned all away and goed splat-splat-splat" (seriously):

Anyway, I've been wondering about Greyhound buses. See, since they're so big, it seems like if they were driving in the weather we've been getting lately, they might slip pretty easily and stuff, and what if they run into telephone wires? It seems to me that since their built pretty low, the bottom of the vehicle might actually touch the ground, which would obviously be wet and snowy, and then it would also be touching the telephone wires. I think some sort of induction would occur, possibly electrocuting the passengers. It just doesn't seem safe, so my basic point is that we should have better greyhound drivers. All the ones I've known have been pretty good, but still, you've got to wonder if that's a fair representation of ALL of them... Also, I think that the drivers should wear hats. Hats are cool, and professional. But they should be really, really cool hats. Maybe they could glow or light up or something. They could have a radio-attached energy sapping system to the bus's battery... But that hasn't been invented yet, so it's probably better if it's just a rechargeable battery... So it would be like "Ridiculously Awesome Bus Service: We have safe drivers that wear really cool glowing rechargeable hats. Which pretty much makes us way cooler than anybody else. And we don't cost an arm and a leg. Did we mention our buses run on Cold Fusion and are no hazard to the environment whatsoever?" ...They would be having such the business there. I mean seriously.

This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it seems I used to take requests as to the content of my blog posts, as the point of that whole section was to incorporate several words / phrases Adam suggested that the post contain. The cool part is how well I managed to fit these words and phrases into the post. I actually didn't catch the point of it all at first.
Secondly, I see that I was a poor writer/communicator, I made dumb mistakes, and I apparently did not proofread my posts.
Thirdly, as I read further, I learned that at one point I doubted the accuracy of Wikipedia and even went so far as to say that it drove me nuts. Those were dark times indeed.
Fourthly, it marks the first recorded use of the phrase "really cool hats." This is a very valuable piece of information, is it not?
And finally, it shows that two years is a lot longer than I had initially thought. It doesn't seem to be a very long time, but this stuff is just weird. Reading it is a very strange and surreal experience.
Now I will put in one more quote from that blog that will probably only be interesting to three particular people (I must remember to tag these people once this gets imported to Facebook):

At some point during the [band] rehearsal, Zach drops his pencil. I have no idea why, but after this Alec steps on said pencil. Small tussle ensues. Alec gets pencil. Alec will not give back pencil. Now, I'm not entirely clear on what what happened after this, but at some point Riley gets the pencil? I don't really know, but I do know that it's now in someone else's possession. Anyhow, after band Zach comes up to me and says:
"Hey, do you want to join my gang? You need connections... friends in high places. I can provide those connections. So what do you say?" (or something along those lines), so I told him, "Sure, why not." (I'm still unsure as to whether this was a good idea). After this he says something like:
"Good. With you, I think I have about nine people! Now we can get my pencil back."

I don't think I ever heard anything else about that. Was the pencil ever returned to its rightful owner? I must know.

Anyway, talking about my older blog makes me think of my very very old MSN blog, which no longer exists. I did save a text file with its contents, however.
Let's see if I can find something from there that isn't ludicrously frightening.
Remember when I was talking about this being a "strange and surreal experience"? Well, it's about to get much, much worse. Of course, this probably just applies to me...
At any rate:

Breaking News!
John and Seth keep incessently repeating, "I'll blast you till tomorrow noooooooooooooooooooooon!"
Details at 11.


Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Now the following portion makes no sense seeing as tomorrow it will be June, nowhere close to January, but they're already selling series 2006 cars, and you can use some imagination right? It's just so funny so I had to put it in before I forgot.

So I've decided to make a new annual tradition of making New Year's Resolutions I have no plans to keep. So this year's will be that I won't do anything, random, unnecessary, wasteful, or otherwise pointless. But since I did that knowing I wasn't going to try to keep it, it's furtherly pointless, and so I just broke the promise by even coming up with it.
Oh my, that was well worth the too much time I spent concocting it. I'd be rolling on the floor laughing by now, but It's a lot harder to do when no-one else is...
And since nobody probobly thought that was funny, it will never happen. Furthermore, that was altogether pointless in about six hundred ways, since the purpose of it was nothing and the subject was pointlessness, it just goes on, and on like this.

This also tells us some interesting things.
1. Life in my house has not changed much. That is a great HSR quote though.
2. I have never been that funny.
3. I used to try.
4. I also used to be a loser
5. My writing/communications skills were even worse back then
But then again, that is to be expected; are there really that many people who look back at themselves three and a half years ago and are proud of what they see?
Anyway. Here's the really funny part about this post. It ends with this statement:

So thus endeth my longest post ever.

...Following about 420 words of mindless babbling.
420 words!
...If you don't find that humorous, you have not been reading this blog long enough. I think my shortest post is about four thousand words.

Yes, I know. That was an exaggeration.


Anyway, this post went in a direction I had not intended. I wanted to share pictures and stuff, not dumb blog posts!

Let's continue then.

Remember this guy?
Probably not. I'm pretty sure nobody ever saw him but me.

A long time ago, I used to make games. In PowerPoint.
It's not the ideal software. But it can indeed make games. They're just incredibly linear.
Nowadays, however, it has become more difficult due to the newer versions of the program. Back in '97, it used to allow subsecond delay times, but not anymore (well, there's something like .5 seconds, but that's still way too long). It's hard to do smooth animations and transition from one event to the next when there's basically a delay of at least half a second between each frame (not really each frame, but I imagine you understand what I mean by this point).
At any rate, due to the restrictions of the program (most notably the inability to use any sort of variable or flag), there were essentially two types of games I could create:
1. Point and click adventure games
2. Trivia / quiz based games
This character is from the latter.
This one (called "Melonheads" for reasons that should be quite obvious) was a more elaborate game, and there were very basic minigames (such as a glorified game of rock paper scissors) that you had to play after every few questions.
I didn't get very far on it, because if one thing has never changed it is my inability to complete projects (I keep coming up with better [?] ideas!).
The first big game I ever finished (I believe) was one in the first category called "Typhoon Katana." You played as... some sort of martial artist or ninja or something. I think you had to fight ghosts (back then, I was terrible at any graphics on the computer, so it was all I could do) or something like that.
It represented months (or at least weeks) of work, and I think I actually thought it was cool when I first made it.
A few other interesting things about this game:
1. It was pretty ugly. I think I knew that at the time but I didn't really want to admit it to myself.
2. It took about twenty seconds to complete (OK, that's maybe an exaggeration, but it was short).
3. I made many shortcuts and oversights and did not bother to fix them.
...I think I still have the game on a disk somewhere, unless I've already "lost" it. But as you can probably tell by now, it has little actual value as a game anyway.
The funny thing is that I often talk about how I want to include a dumb game as an easter egg in one of my games and say it is "my first game."
I'm not going to explain how this goes because it's funnier if I tell it to you (even then, you won't think it's funny unless your sense of humor is somewhat similar to mine). But basically it's absolutely terrible and is not really a game at all.
Anyway, thinking about it now... heh, that makes me think of Derren Brown (doubtlessly a topic of discussion for another time).
Oh, sorry. What was I talking about? (Oh, the irony.) Right. Thinking about it now, this imaginary game is not all that worse than these actual games made in PowerPoint.
Now, this reminds me of some cartoons I made in PowerPoint with Andy, but, much to my dismay, those have been lost. I wonder if I have them on a disk somewhere? Somehow I think I must (or Andy does, if I don't).
Anyway, that is a very very long story. Not for today.

Moving on.
Here's something that you will probably find interesting. I know I did, at least.
I knew the concept (or at least, the character concept) for Purple Jelly was old, but I never knew it was this old (and possibly even older):



I believe I did these very soon after I discovered Game Maker. I wanted to make a platformer right away, but that was way beyond my abilities at that point.
These sprites were made about two years ago.
The first image's filename? purplejelly.png.
Not "purple blob". Not "purple ooze". "Jelly".
Eerie.

One more thing before I call it quits for today (and yesterday, and the day before that... I've been working on this post off and on since Monday, despite the fact that it is not terribly lengthy):

...This is the logo under which I was going to "publish" my games at one point.
I initially spelled it "squarkle" because it was an amalgamation between a square and a circle (this came up my first year at LABC because we were unable to properly form a circle any time we all gathered for any form of meeting; I'm not sure who coined the term initially), with -- for unexplainable reasons (likely for no reason at all) -- an image of a weedy sea dragon in the center.
That was before I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, naturally. Then I started spelling it differently and attaching the name to various random things (I'm sure we've all heard the story about dodgeball already, so I won't tell it again).

"Dude, we just got owned by squerkles!"

Expect interesting stories in the future; I liked doing this... In a weird sort of way.
If it's been a while and I still haven't told any, remind me.

:::Source expected
:::10.12.08
:::STOP


Quick note-
New poll. Maybe this sort of question will become a recurring feature?