9 posts tagged “poll”

Would you prefer to have your last name be:

(a) Walnuts,
(b) Thursday,
(c) Handsome, or
(d) Praxis?

Today we bought a bag of frozen, peeled roasted chestnuts at Trader Joe's. Now I am wondering what on earth I should do with them. Any excellent (vegetarian) suggestions?

I lost my wallet this weekend. I've already cancelled all my cards (there was no activity on any of them) and am going to wait a bit before I go to get a new driver's license just in case someone dropped the wallet in the mail, and besides who wants to spend all that time in the belly of bureaucracy, BUT I do want to get a new wallet. The problem is that I have CRITERIA. I would like my wallet to be:

1. plain (though not necessarily black),
   
2. attractive,
3. not absolutely enormous, and
   
4. possessed of a suitable compartment for change.

I found one online that's absolutely ideal, except: HO HO HO, it's made by Prada and costs over two hundred dollars. Heeeelp meeee.

What do you think?

• A view across the rooftops of a town made of umbrellas
• Wombats abed (but you know beds are hard to draw!)
• That fennel bulb and its feathery foliage -- but in what setting? Perhaps some lumberjacks.
• Three Men in a Crouton Boat (To Say Nothing of the Bulldog)

Does anyone else use "smurfy" as a term of opprobrium? The meaning I have in mind is something along the lines of appallingly dinky, embarrassing, squirm-inducing in a sort of overload of lame sincerity kind of way. Or did I just make it up? I have no idea, and can't seem to find any examples of this usage in a quick internet search, but it just feels so right.

To help you get the idea:

"Mother, please don't tell me my virginity is a precious flower! That's so smurfy. God !"

"That guy down the hall freaks me out. He's so fucking smurfy."

"No, you cannot wear that hat and maintain any shred of dignity, because it is totally smurfy."

Have you seen the Eyezmaze game Chronon? It's a game of contigencies, like On's previous Flash games in the "Grow" series. There are a number of set points at which you can manipulate various items, and depending on the order in which you mess with them, different results ensue. The objective is to find the optimal order in which to do things. In his best games, wrong choices and right choices alike have interesting/charming outcomes, which keeps things lively, and the right choices are emotionally satisfying.

Chronon is nifty in that it works on this same principle, but you can bounce back and forth along the timeline to see how a given change you made affects things down the line, instead of having to work your way through the sequence and start over each time you want to do it in a different order. If I do X at 6:15 and Y at 9:05, what's the state of affairs at 12:25? Ooh, not good -- let me go back to 9:05 and do something else and see how that works out.

At the same time, a nice thing happened where my sense of what my objective was changed while I fiddled around, and based on things I glimpsed at the end of the timeline while I was definitely still provisionally rearranging things. Spoilers ahoy:

It seemed at first that I should want to poison the shuffling monster who I figured had imprisoned "me" (I'm not sure why I associated myself with the little figure in the cage, especially since it was clearly in no position to be doing all the stuff I was up to with moving pots and pans and clocks around). But long before I got to the point where I could slip some poison into his cake, I did some other thing that resulted in the shuffling monster's coming home to a dark and empty house, and he looked SO SAD. There was no way I wanted to poison him now! And indeed it turns out that the winning ending is happy for all involved.

So, my question is: Is there any way at all to achieve, somehow, a similar effect in interactive fiction? It's tantalizing, and obviously it would be very different in all kinds of ways in its execution, but something that somehow echoed this structure and experience while working as IF seems like it would be so great to me. How might it be done?

PS. I used the quote feature in lieu of a proper spoiler tag so you could see where the spoiler ends. Is that a good convention, do you think?

Another drawing made with the tablet. It's not as sexy as the frilly-headed carrot, but I like the poster-y quality on this one. Mise en scene, if any, to be decided. Please make suggestions. It's fun!

Maybe it should be towering over a dense grey cityscape, or maybe some small creatures should be resting in the shade of its leaves? I haven't forgotten about the other carrot options either.

Broccoli

Help me! I am a gamer doofus. We have no console, and are Mac, not PC, people, so my gaming experience is very limited, though I do play a fair number of Flash games. Yet I feel I could enjoy having a handheld. I have so little idea of what I would actually enjoy or not enjoy in one that I don't know that I could do a good job of choosing which to get. The DS lite is clearly the hot new thing with its super bright screens and everything, but the two screens look somehow like a strain to hold up and keep track of. Are they? What about the stylus -- it looks like more trouble than it's worth, maybe. Is it?

I don't even know if the kind of games I like really exist on portable systems. This is complicated by the fact that I don't have a good handle on what actually constitutes the category of games I like. I have enjoyed:

• Katamari (but I hear the portable version is lame)
• Shadow of the Colossus (although it did make me feel too bad about my PC (in the player character sense, not personal computer!) to go on playing -- I'm sensitive, I guess)
  
• Grow and the other excellent games from Eyezmaze
  
• Evil addictive Colorbox and Weboggle
• Hapland and its sequels
• The Asylum
  
• Orisinal games like Chicken Wings Are Not For Flying
  

First-person shooters tend to end up with me running into the wall a lot and then dying. In the casual-gaming Flash realm, apparently popular point-and-click games like Viridian Room make me want to tear my face off (so ugly and pointless).
So tell me: what do I want?

Work bought me a splendid little Wacom Intuos3 tablet, which I used to draw the following exciting vegetable:

Carrot

I want to give this lonely carrot floating in space a place to call its own. Which would be best:

(a) A tiny exurban landscape with little houses dotted over rolling hills, across which the giant carrot casts its long and chilly shadow?

(b) A relatively featureless plain, but also a ladder propped up against the carrot, climbed by... some creature. An astronaut? A rabbit? An astronaut rabbit? Other?

(c) Something else altogether?