New Enlark Website

I've put some of my unexpected development downtime into a new website for Enlark, my company. I'd love any comments or criticisms on the design or current lack of content. I'll be filling out more content as I go.

For the technically curious, I built a very simple mini-CMS for this site (I call "spot light" or "spotlight") upon Google's App Engine and I'm debating sharing some of the code behind it...

Damn this technology dependency!

Well, fuck. It seems that Quark, my 4-year old "work" system has succumbed to click-rot. It doesn't appear to see any hard drives available and considering the current drive is screwed in pretty tightly I'm guessing it's the dreaded laptop hard drive click of death. The timing could not be worse. Fortunately all of my data should be backed up and current, but this will slow efforts on my game and I've been trying to get things ready for PAX. My other laptop (Quiche, friendly neighborhood Ubuntu machine and device unto which I expound this current situation) isn't equipped to handle the development environment that I need.

Quark and Quiddity both haunt me as brain dead shells of what they once were and I'm left debating my options. I could try for a new hard drive for Quark, other than the hard drive I think the rest of the system is fairly good shape. Easiest would be to buy a new system, but I was hoping to hold that off until I had a bit more actual income... No matter what I'm not entirely excited about having to rebuild my environment and seek out as many licenses as I can from boxes and CD stacks... It's certainly a nasty set back for time with only a few more weeks to PAX! It may be that I should spend the money I was planning to invest in a PAX trip into the new computer, which will be sad but that's the world of the small business owner pretending to be a graduate student... By the way, anyone interested in investing in a small business?

Meanwhile, the last build I published to my partners should be an almost demo of the game... I ...

My View for the Next Batman

I don't need to review The Dark Knight as many, many others have already done so and have said just about all I could say on the subject. Yes, I think it is the best comic-based film to date.

Moving on, I have strong opinions on things that I want to see from further Batman films and after sharing a few of them in recent discussions I thought it might be fun to catalog them in one place and open them up for debate. I'll actually focus on my more controversial choices and hopefully someone will be willing to argue that I'm crazy. Plus I'm not going to follow any one Graphic Novel line-up, and I know that drives some people crazy.

I doubt that this is where the next film will actually go, but if someone actually involved in the films wants to use these ideas (and I doubt they'll spread that far), I hereby offer them for free with only the request that I get a small "inspired by" credit. Heh.

The big tenet that I want to get across, the theme to what I'd like to see in the next Batman is that I think its finally time that we see "The World's Greatest Detective" side of the character finally make it to the big screen. Both of the Nolan films offer glimpses, but I think it would be cool to see a good "puzzler" film that attempts to leave the audience guessing just as much, if not more, than Batman. (I think Nolan has the chops for that given Memento and The Prestige.)

The only other thing that I would want to do is establish "the reign of the Joker". I realize that it may seem too early to ...

Miscellanea: Request for Comments, Darcsforge

I was in the process of writing a custom commenting system because I wanted threaded comments, OpenID, and Gravatar, at the very least, and there's currently no existing Django aggregation that supports all of those. I got maybe 85% done on that when I discovered Intense Debate and as you may have noticed, I've gone ahead and installed it. On the one hand I like letting someone else focus on making things cool, and it has all of the features that I was looking for and almost had in my custom thing. On the other hand right now the tool is JS-only, which means that non-JS enabled browsers (like lynx, which I often test my sites against, actually) don't see the comments. So, does anyone have a strong opinion for/against Intense Debate? Does the social network aspects make up for the requirement of JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript? I still feel torn between the power of finishing my own custom thing and ease of using someone else's work and continued innovation...

In interesting news in case anyone is following Darcsforge, I've actually been working on it recently. I've just about finished a new feature that I think makes my small, simple, goofy issue tracker quite a bit more actually useful: Repository-based Issue Tracking. This was a "two weekend hack" project of sorts and was a nice way to get back into the code base. It encouraged me to write the first bit of code necessary to get the file annotation information. That will be helpful when it comes time to get back to finishing the file-browser stuff.

Also, I went ahead and purchased darcsforge.org to make the project a little more respectable and eventually I might move the homepage of the project from its ...

Summer of the Batman

I've been reading a copy of the Absolute Dark Knight and the seminal 80s Miller work is a very interesting background to this summer's hype for The Dark Knight. I'm actually quite excited about this film and my brother and I already have purchased our IMAX tickets perfectly center for a matinee showing next Friday.

My favorite piece of promo hype has to be Gotham Cable News (now "Joker-ified" it seems in the final lead-up to movie launch), a vertical cross-promotion with Time Warner's Comcast cable unit. Centerpiece of this fine buffet of Gotham-centric news feeds are the segments from Gotham Tonight, a new journal in the fashion of a 60 Minutes or Anderson Cooper with the primary host being "Mike Engel", none other than Anthony Michael-Hall playing Gotham City "Anderson Cooper" with aplomb and seemingly a good bit of fun. This is just a cool character, even without the requisite rumor that the Nolan brothers are grooming Anthony Michael-Hall for an appearance as the Riddler in the capstone to the modern Bat-trilogy. (Newscaster with obvious psuedonym seems like a reasonable background for the Riddler to me.) This week Mike Engel interviews Harvey Dent, which is awesome.

GCN particularly makes it obvious how wide and far into Batman canon the Nolan brothers have knowledge of. There were several direct references to Dark Knight Returns in the GCN news coverage, which works wonderfully considering Miller's focus on talking head news shows in his graphic novels.

This week also marked the arrival of Batman: Gotham Knight, the animated "lead-up" DVD. I was quite happy with the anthology. I felt there were several stand out stories in the anthology, top three were certainly Working Through Pain and the ending Deadshot (arguably the reason for the anthology's existence ...

Wall-E and the Golgafrinchams

I loved Wall-E. I particularly loved its pessimistic background and I think it may be the closest thing we see to Idiocracy for Kids.

I got into a long argument the other day about the technology in Wall-E. It was my opinion that there was a fairly clear dichotomy between types of technology that we saw and as a crazy sci-fi guy this leads to my own weird speculation on the timeline of Wall-E. I realize that I'm certainly over-thinking this, but perhaps others might find my "theory" interesting.

Here's what I'm lead to believe: Smart people band together to build an extra-solar colonization effort. This mega-corporation, call it the Cadre [1], of the rich, the intelligent, and any poor people willing/able to work off-Earth in manufacturing jobs builds a few extra-solar colony ships (presumably with resources from the asteroid belts and other planets). Upon the launch of the colony ships the mega-corporation is left as a somewhat rich shell of its former self, as economic wealth doesn't exactly cross star systems. The construction plans and schematics for the extra-solar colonization ships would have earthly copyrights, and thus when a cheapskate box store (Buy 'N' Large) buys what's left of the mega-corporation they gain a lot of interesting patents and designs.

All that's left on Earth at this takeover looks like a mix of the useless, the lazy, the fat "middle managers", etc. In essence we have the reverse ploy pulled upon the useless Golgafrincham in H2G2 canon. But here, I think, things get interesting: the Buy 'N' Large management manages to dig through the old Cadre notes and manages to put 2 and 2 together and actually manages to do updated tracking of global warming and earthly resource consumption... They decide to ...

Web Community of the Moment: IconBuffet

I was introduced to IconBuffet (fyi, personal referral link, no money just "game points") [1], which might be described as Pokécon or World of Iconcraft. It takes a large and growing collection of "free" [2] icons from a handful of talented Icon "Chefs" and creates an artificial scarcity/value for the icon sets by wrapping them in a simple economy game, associating the sets with time and effort and giving a bit of extra interest to what might otherwise be glossed over as "yet another collection of 'free' icons". The game mechanics encourages active community members that they've "got to collect them all".

The game design uses three pseudo-currencies and award 'badges' that will be familiar from a number of other websites and several MMOs. [3] The currencies are Tokens, Stamps, and Points:

Stamps

The "postage" required to send a set that you have in your collection to someone else's collection. You gain stamps whenever you accept the delivery of a set that someone else has sent you. (This is done at an asymmetrical exchange rate to encourage sending but not spamming: sending requires a range of stamps from 1-10 depending on the quality/style/rarity of the set you are sending, whereas redeeming a delivery yields 5 points regardless.)

Tokens

Tokens are paid for each delivery you redeem and are equal to the "postage" of the delivery you receive. Thus sets are somewhat "payment on delivery". Tokens are generated at a steady rate with respect to time, beginning at 10 tokens per month for a new free membership.

Points

Points are the repetition/friendliness/community score and are received for each successful delivery you make to someone else, as well as through other means such as successful referrals. Points are not redeemed, but reaching certain scores generate ...

Blogs of the Round Table: I Cannot Survive Without a Little Help From My Friends

As far back as I can remember games for me have always been a communal, social experience. I can tell you that my earliest memories involving video games have to do with my older cousin bringing his NES with him during the holidays, or the days of tall-tale telling around a library copy of Cosmic Osmo, or the trading of tips and floppy-based save games for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but nowhere, I think, is my dependence on social interaction for game playing as apparent as it is when it comes to difficult challenges in games.

I've admitted before that I generally know my own horizon of gaming skills seems pretty near compared to many people that I know and meet. In some ways this has contributed to my generally broad knowledge of gaming as a whole, as my easy frustrations early in so many games have left me all the more eager to move on to many, many more games.

For most genres, if I have beaten a game, it was in tandem with friends. Even games that I haven't beaten I never would have seen as much as I did if it were not for my family and my friends. My brother and one of my sisters and I spent a few weeks in a "Star competition" in the same save game of Super Mario 64. Soon after that we spent a summer attempting to beat Rayman 2 by sharing a single controller and deciding whose skills best matched which zones. One of my skills at that time turned out to be a decent mastery of the game's underwater mechanics. My sister and brother ...

Cutscenes and the Interactive Movie Blight (Blogs of the Round Table Followup)

In a comment to my June Round Table post Deirdra wondered where the line is between smart storytelling via non-interactive cutscenes and "Hollywood envy".

I don't think "Hollywood envy" is a problem, and I think the "interactive movie blight" is itself a perfect example of why there is no "Hollywood envy" problem. Most of the old "interactive movies" sometimes failed because of goofy or bad "interaction", but generally more often failed because the movies themselves were just bad. As a culture we've tried to forget abortions like Mr. Payback and yet the (sometimes cruel) animated Dragon's Lair continues to find new audiences solely for the warmth and the heart instilled by Don Bluth's animation and knowledge of storytellin and in spite of its simplistic and annoying "gameplay". People point out all of the failures of the "interactive movie" eras, but for every Loadstar (seemingly the bastard sequel to the awful Space Truckers film) or Night Trap there was a Wing Commander 3 or Under a Killing Moon... If you look at even this small sampling I think facts become apparent that the worst atrocities came more from a "Video Game Envy" amongst Hollywood, Dragon's Lair fails as a good video game, but it was an attempt by a well known animator to create an "interactive animated movie". Mr. Payback was an awful attempt by writer/director Bob Gale (whose best works remain his writing for Back to the Future) to bring his storytelling attempts to gaming without any knowledge of how to make a good interactive experience. Rocket Science Games, creators of Loadstar, only started to make good games once they stopped getting money from media conglomerate and co-founder BMG, stopped thinking themselves as a "Hollywood studio" full of rock stars and started hiring real ...