Educational Game?
Every so often I get the urge to find an old game series I had played at my elementary school. The name of the series was something like "Twist-a-plots" or "Twist-a-plotz", I don't remember exactly. What I do remember was there were a bunch of them, with different topics.
One I remember was a murder mystery game based on the Wizard of Oz storyline. Another was a side platformer with a black background, which involved exploring a castle or mansion or something to the affect. Another one involved a loosely isometric perspective that involved going through a forest, and had I believe an hourglass in the corner and might have involved time travel. Another one was a side platformer with two chapters, it had a blue background and involved going through a museum, something about Neopolitan ice cream, and for sure involved time travel, with the first chapter trying to find the password to the time travel machine, which, as I recall, was "Byzantine". Another one had something to do with the great plains, and showed a map of the western US. The only one I can actually remember the name of was "Shot Heard 'Round the World", which had something to do with the event the title refers to. There were several more games but I don't remember them. The last one I do remember was something involving the CIA or something and computer hacking, but that game was installed bad on our school network and didn't work.
The only problem with finding these is they are missing from the internet. Every time I try to search for anything related to them, there is no result. I don't know if they were by a local Utah company or something, whatever it is, however, they simply don't exist on the internet from what I can find. My only point of contact that would know, my 3rd grade teacher Mr. Brown, who was also the network admin and had the disks to be able to reinstall the games when they were bad (the aforementioned one with the hacker seemed to have a bad floppy as well because we tried reinstalling it a couple times that year but it still didn't work) no longer works at the school. I don't know anyone else that might remember them, leaving my only resource being the Internet.
If anyone knows the names of the games, and the manufacturer, please, let me know so I can find them.
Tags: software video_games
Archival
What if the world were to end tomorrow?
What if everyone suddenly died from some mysterious thing, and there was nothing left. There wouldn't be any point in talking about it, of course, at that point would be the end. But what if there were some survivors, a single person or a group, who decided to preserve history at the point where it all ended. What would be left of you?
Would they find detailed information about you? Photographs, letters, a journal documenting your life. Would they have the information to be able to record who you were, what you did, your likes and dislikes, and what you did? Or would they have nothing to go on, an empty room, sparse of identifying material, leaving them with maybe at most your name? Would they have the information to record who you were, or would you be forgotten by history?
History only consists of what is recorded. Without records, the past didn't happen. Without the past, there is no direction for the future. Will you be recorded, or will you fade into non-existence?
Tags: new_alexandria regularspelling writing
Spam Overload
Good mercy, am I glad the spam filters on here work, because I just happened to look at the spam log trying to find where these referrals from some outdoors website forum were coming from, and there were like 100 posts just today alone worth of blocked spam. The devblog doesn't quite get that many, but there are 21 blocked messages on there for today.
Date posted: 18 September, 2008Tags: anacondasoftware internet regularspelling
Holder of Language
Being from the internet, I see a lot of it. A lot of misinformation, a lot of fierce opinions, and most interestingly, a lot of culture. The internet is truly a place with no boundaries, the culture of the internet can develop day or night, with no strict personality except the general population of the internet. Lolcats, Rickrolling, and so forth, things develop on small parts of the internet then become internetwide, a brand new culture that ends up sometimes spilling into the real world. And they have their own lore, their own rumors, their own stories.
I like the horror genre. I like zombie films, vampyre stories, and other sorts of things. But not so much monsters and cheap scare tactics, what I enjoy much more is psychological horror, the things that really get in your mind and make you scared. Phobias are one such category, for which I've come up with a series of storylines for games. Illuminatis, mafia, corrupt and opressive governments, nobody else you can trust, such horrors as that as well. The general idea of fear being what you cannot understand, and having things laid out so you cannot understand. Horror that wears away at your mind, not your instincts, much more interesting.
Urban legends are classic examples of such sorts of things, but the creative culture of the internet has risen to new stories not heard anyone else, but shared by the collective population. There are many different things that come up, and I enjoy them variously. One particular one I enjoy a lot is the Holders series.
The Holders series involves stories of certain key items spread among the world, held by certain keepers, called the Holders. These people and items exist on a plane outside the normal, a world accessible only from where logic barely holds, any mental institution or halfway house anywhere. Collectively the items combine to form something, of which isn't known, but the storyline involves what needs to be done to find each one, what each item can do, and the dangers that each one present. It is told in second person, referring to the reader as the primary character, the Seeker of Holders, who is on the quest to find the items.
They must never come together. Never.
Tags: holders internet movies writing
Pronounced
English is a rather strange language. It is filled with many different language influences, and it is full of conflicting grammatical rules. It is hard to find any good consistency to it, but sometimes that comes in handy.
As I've mentioned at least a couple times before, the character of The Anaconda in the Spiral Island storyline shares my name, because it began with a story that was originally explored in the first person and I am horrible at character naming. The problem with this is it maes it unintentionally appear like some poor self-insertion story, which is not what I intend to display really. I do intend to have cameo roles occasionally, but as myself, a game developer as part of the crowd and not as a focused role of the story. Being one of the main characters of the Spiral Island storyline is not intentional, but no other name fits the character, it's simply too ingrained in my mind to be able to rename him.
However, an unintentional side effect of English ended up bringing me to an alternative. The language is a vocal language, the written part of it came afterward. The problem comes from the fact that there were no strictly defined rules as they started recording the words for the written language, which means that the spellings of things is based on how someone decided it should be spelled. It may or may not be pronounced the way it is spelled, which of course leads to the necessity of phonics for learning English, but then leaves some confusion related to names.
The solution, as I discovered, comes into play related to names. My own last name is not pronounced they way it is spelled, it is pronounced "Chaney". Most people pronounce it as it is written, however, pronouncing it "Chee-knee". As things are stored in the mind aurally, and not generally as written words, a new solution comes into play. I can change the last name of the character to Chaney, making it separate from my own name, while at the same time not having to through an arduous task of not only coming up with a suitable new name for the character, but also replacing that name everywhere in my mind in relation to the vastly complex, much larger storyline that the Spiral Island Trilogy is only a small part of. All things are now set right, and the only thing that's still common between the two is the alias. Maybe changing to sRc is worth another shot.
Tags: english linguistic names pronunciation spiral_island