What happens when you get a bunch of quirky kids together with their uncle who loves mad science and making weird fudge?
Peep Fudge
Peeps are weird treats. I can’t stand them, but to each their own. They make a good marshmallow substitute in fudgemaking, though, so we wound up… experimenting. We swapped peeps in for the marshmallows and added a dozen crushed mint OREO cookies at the end. The fudge is a mildly minty “cookies and cream” fudge that just happens to look like stroganoff. Luckily, it doesn’t taste much like it, though.
There are probably some moral messages in there somewhere, like “don’t follow the crowd”, “be careful with what friends and parties you pick”, and “don’t trust a boiling hot tub”, but it was mostly just a fun evening with a crazy idea. Happy post-Easter candy sales!
CafePress carries one of my shirt designs, but I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of their limitations on free shops, so most of my products will be offered via Zazzle for the forseeable future.
I also do the occasional commission, but to date, that’s mostly been for in-game currency over on the Puzzle Pirates forums, where I’m known as Silveransom, from whence several of the bits of art in my Mini Portfolio hail, and where one of my art tutorials resides. I’d love to open the floodgates to do commissions for cash, but since I can’t promise a quick turnaround, I’ll just say that I’m very open to requests, I’m just going to be somewhat less than a full-time production house. Somewhat less than part-time, really, but you might be surprised what is possible to do in the wee hours around midnight when the kids go to bed.
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Y’see, things are unnaturally busy here at the Tesh household. We’re finishing the basement, so my “vacation” from work this holiday season isn’t exactly filled with carefree whimsy and mad dashes to fulfill art requests. Still, I’m working in a bit, here and there.
So yes, Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas, or whatever it is you do this time of year!
…are the Steam sales up yet? That’s kind of an event, right?
I like music. I like games. Intersections of the two make me happy.
A good chunk of my musicallibrary is game music. I’m a fan of AudioSurf, a slick little “sound rider” game that can be played as a relaxing cruise through my favorite music or a skill-testing scramble. Lately, though, maybe because I’ve had a lack of vitamin BSU in my gaming diet (Blow Stuff Up), I’ve really been enjoying Symphony.
Symphony takes your music library (or the one they provide) and asks you to clean out corruption in it, imposed by a malevolent digital entity of some sort. You fly a ship with four cannons (you wind up with a variety of weapons that you can slot in), reacting to the algorithms that the game uses to make bad guys based on your music. It’s a delightfully flexible system, with no two songs really playing quite the same way (and each song plays differently for each difficulty level). The story and character are just kinda… there. Not bad, just not all that compelling. I’m not convinced you really need a reason to play a game that’s this simple at its core; just go blow stuff up and have a blast doing it.
The TRON-flavored visuals are excellent, if a bit overwhelming before you get used to filtering the visual chaff. It’s really satisfying to upgrade your guns a few times, maybe angling them or using a spread cannon or shotgun, and throwing up a huge swath of happy, glowing death, blasting a swarm of bad guys into note-shaped shrapnel.
Most importantly, though, blowing stuff up is glorious fun. For me, the visuals and story can make or break a game, but only at the margins. The gameplay is what really matters, and Symphony is simply fun to play. Set your cannons to autofire (holding down the mouse button for constant fire is a good recipe for carpal tunnel, so autofire is the way to go), and you can just concentrate on flying. Or maybe try out a Subwoofer weapon that only fires according to the music (where a subwoofer would be used, of course, nicely demonstrated in the game’s trailer). Or how about a Crescendo weapon, a “charge and release” sort of weapon, or a Missile Rack that functions much the same way, offering devastating firepower in a narrow arc. Perhaps it’s best to put in that Shotgun or Spread Cannon and just dominate the play field. Maybe even use that Dual Cannon that fires behind you for those sneaky bad guys that push you out of the “bottom of the screen pocket” that lower difficulty levels allow.
Speaking of difficulty, it’s also a forgiving game. It presumes that you want to actually play through your whole song, so while your ship may be destroyed, you just respawn after a few seconds. Your ship can also be partially destroyed, and picking up the “Inspiration” that bad guys drop repairs your ship. So you can wind up with just one cannon as your wings get clipped, but you can get back in the game after you destroy some bad guys and pick up their offerings. Of course, your score suffers if you do completely crash, both with a straight score penalty and with missed opportunities to score while you’re regenerating, but there doesn’t seem to be a penalty just for ship damage that subsequently gets repaired.
Here’s a quick video that I found online that goes over some of the basics. I kind wish I could make a video, but that’s way down the priority list.
There are some fun “progression/collection” mechanics that unlock the variety of weapons and let you upgrade them, and player-selected difficulty levels which unlock as you play through your library. This incentivizes playing through different songs, as there is the occasional rare variant of a weapon that packs more punch. I do wish there were more weapons that did different things, and more that interacted with the music itself, but the dozen or so weapons in the game do provide a good mix of attack options without becoming overwhelming, and simplicity in game design isn’t really a bad thing.
…there’s room for a sequel, that’s all I’m saying.
In the meantime, though, Symphony is a sweet game that even stole some time I might have been playing Torchlight 2, the other game I was really happy to pick up in the Black Friday sales. I got Symphony at GoG.com’s “five for $10″ sale, along with the Blackwell Bundle, Botanicula, Resonance and Unmechanical. …as if my game backlog wasn’t full already. Still, for $20 I picked up 9 games that I’m really looking forward to playing. I’ve dabbled with all of them except for the Blackwell games, and so far, I’m happy with them all… though Symphony is the one I keep coming back to. Yes, yes, Torchlight 2 is a gem, packed with vitamin KSALI (Kill Stuff And Loot It), but it’s more involved. With my rather constrained game play time of late, the quick play of Symphony really fits the bill. I’d love to just settle into some marathon sessions of Torchlight 2 or Guild Wars 2, or even Tactics Ogre for the PSP that I got for my birthday, but my schedule is… squirrely.
At least there’s plenty of good gaming in the wings, when I can get to it.
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Oh, and just because I wanted to get these out there while I’m thinking about them, I ran into some pretty crazy photographs lately. Some very cool stuff can be done with very high speed photography and water, as Tim Tadder illustrates with these shots:
I’m doing a new Thing here. OK, it’s something I’ve already done, but now I’m calling it TEShots. (For now, anyway.) I take a LOT of photographs of the world around me, and every once in a while, I feel like sharing. Today, it’s the Minecraft Edition.
We’re excavating a smallish pit on the back of our house, so we can make the existing window into a proper bedroom window, so we can remodel/finish the basement and squeeze in another bedroom. It’s actually something that’s bugged me since we bought this house; there’s no proper escape from the basement in the case of fire. Ah, the building code of the late 70s. Anyway, to save $2000, we had the concrete cutter people cut a chunk out of our back porch, and I’m digging out the new window well so they can come back and cut out the window space.
It turns out that excavation is way easier in Minecraft than in real life. Weird, huh?
Big Rock, Small Pit
Yes, that’s a 100-pound rock I pulled out, and the one still in the pit wound up being over 200 pounds. I had to get help for that one, since it turns out that hitting it with my fist didn’t break it into small blocks.
The crazy thing is that those rocks, though the biggest ones I’ve had to deal with, were hardly the only rocks. By weight, I’ve pulled probably about a literal ton of rock out of that hole, and I’m not even done yet. My father-in-law helped with the top layer of busted concrete and the top layer of obvious rocks, and my brother and his friend helped with that biggest beast of a rock, but there has been plenty for me to do in between. There was a bit of soil and clay in there, too, but the ground here in the Rocky Mountains is, well… rocky. It’s also fairly compact. Speaking of volume, I’ll probably have pulled out the equivalent of two of these trailers… which sure seems like a lot more than should be in that hole to a depth of 5 feet.
Trailer o’ Fun
Apologies for not getting more shots of the project in progress. In the meantime, here’s a photo of where the rocks wound up. It took that bulldozer two pushes to get our load on the pile. Less than a minute for weeks of work to be just another part of the crowd.
Assimilated
Yeah, we have rocks here. Lots of rocks. I’m just glad my father-in-law is letting us use his trailer. This would have been even more of a project without it. Yay for summertime house projects, hm?
I took a recent trip to see my sister’s family in southern Utah. En route, I put my new camera through some paces.
First, taking photos at 80 miles per hour through the window of a van usually produces little more than a blur, but this surprised me. I counter-moved the camera as we went past a rock wall, and hoped for a decent shot. This is what came of that little experiment. The diagonal focus band is what really surprised me, and this is one of my favorite images from the trip.
rocks by road at 80 mph
Then there’s the rather largish gas station that is, well… abandoned. The sunshine went dark, I guess. Just my sort of playground. There’s more at the Picasa site for this, but here are a couple of my favorites.
Sunshine Station Close
Looking Up
Last but not least, there’s the little burned tourist trap shack by the Cove Fort gas station. It was built to look like an old log cabin, but it’s suffered some hard times. Naturally, this makes for some great photos. (Again, more at the Picasa site.)
Burned Panel
Burned Door
Now, to plan some other trips to see some natural wonders and ghost towns. Maybe even Yellowstone someday. It’s not that far away.
I’m joining the digital SLR ranks with a Canon Rebel T3. Also on order, a white umbrella, some slave flashes, and a remote control (all the better for those “bulb” extended exposures like star shots and light painting). Then, I’m going shopping for supplies to build some do-it-myself tripods for the flashes and umbrella (I’m thinking of bugging the local hospitals to see if they have old IV stands for sale/free, and maybe repurposing some old office chairs and such), and maybe even setting up a muslin backdrop and tie dyeing it with the leftovers from the Great Dice Experiment.
So what’s the first big photo shoot? Something old, if I can help it. That’s just where my mind inevitably goes when I think “explore and take pictures“.
Maybe not a trip to Pripyat or BattleshipIsland (though those would be awesome to go shoot in, the ol’ budget isn’t too kind to such ideas), and I missed the time window for Kowloon (though I’d be afraid of what I’d find there), but there are a few ghost towns around here I can get to without a ton of travel. That’s one nice thing about living in the western U.S.; there are a lot of old prospecting towns out in the deserts and mountains, so there’s plenty to see beyond taking panorama sets of the terrain itself. This new camera even has some HDR potential, so I’m looking forward to experimenting with that.
Yes, that means I’ll be taking photos of the Real World instead of adding to my 9,000+ MMOscreenshots, but I hear that “fresh air” is good for you. Maybe it’s time to find out.
I love photographs of old, broken stuff and places. I’m not sure if it’s the photographer in me or just a pining for the past I never knew, but modern photographs of old or broken things are some of my favorite visuals to study. They make for great story fodder and reference material, too.
I find photos of failed construction projects to be similarly fascinating. This, for example, is a composite shot of a failed building project near my home. This is one of two giant apartment/business combo buildings that was started during the housing boom. It was never something our community even needed in the first place, but the housing bubble broke and the construction company simply ran out of money. (They were counting on preselling $1,000,000 condos to finance the construction… in our community where $200,000 will buy a good sized family home and the average salary is $45,000/year or so. Yeah, they didn’t really understand math.) It’s a blight on our main thoroughfare, a testament to bad economics and stupendous lack of foresight. And yet it remains. Unfinished, untended, unnecessary.
Failed Building Construction
I wrote about this before in my Falling Apart article. I highly recommend going and checking that out, as it carries the bulk of the philosophical rumination I might offer in this vein, and better, some really cool photos and links.
In the meantime, I’ve been collecting links to other fascinating collections of photographs in the same vein; busted buildings, urban decay and varied displays of the ravages of time. Some of it may be politically or socially charged, at least in the implications, some of it might simply be due to the inexorable march of time. Some of it, like the Chinese ghost cities, the ruins of Prypiat or the Winchester Mystery House, is ripe for storytelling, whether digging into the actual stories or riffing on reality for fictional fun.
Much of it is somber, sad and even tragic. Sometimes it’s creepy, and the realities can be appalling. Still, it’s fascinating, and it invokes musings on mortality and the meaning of life and why we do what we do. Is it more important to have lived well or to have left something behind? What is the most important mark of our passage in this mortal coil? …is it important at all? What if death were unhinged, what then? What can those who have gone before teach us today? Do we care, or do we keep making the same dumb mistakes, only to see our work on the scrap heap of history?
Just to make my quirky heavy Explorer position a bit clearer, it’s instructive to look at how I’ve spent my time since acquiring Cold Weather Flight, which allowed my Tauren Druid to fly pretty much anywhere in the overworld.
95% of my play time since then has been in the air.
I take a lot of screenshots. Let’s call it an occupational hazard, working on art in the game industry as I do. I like to see what’s out there. I think I have about 8,000 screenshots of WoW over about 1 year of play total (spread out over almost 5 years).
Then again, I also take a lot of photos in the real world. My children call them “daddy dork” photos, where I take shots purely for texture or lighting reference. I’ve taken about 400 real world photos this month (I love digital cameras), and half of them have been “daddy dork” photos. Someday I’ll collect them all and offer them on CD or something like Mayang does.
I’ve not played much since I ran out of game time in March (F2P/Starter Thumpin experiment aside, of course), but recently, Blizzard offered me 14 free days to come look around. They really wanted me to look at the new Firelands content.
So naturally, I tried to get the best screenshots of Gilneas that I could.
Y’see, I ran into this excellent “Gilneas Time Capsule” article a while back, and I wanted to get some shots of the place with a character who can fly. Worgen can get the best shots of Duskhaven (since it is destroyed as you progress through the area, and Horde characters never see it intact), but not from the air. I love to get aerial shots to really get a sense of the scope of the cities and world features of the game. There are also some things and views that you’ll just never get from the ground.
I’m taking advantage of some quirks of the phasing system in WoW. There’s this dramatic story of the Forsaken invasion of Gilneas that drives low level Forsaken and Worgen questing, but it’s told in phases with the world changing here and there as you progress. If you ignore the Forsaken Front quests, and just fly into the city itself, the city is completely empty (and so is pretty much anything past the Greymane Wall). It’s pretty much a ghost town, so you can get great shots of the terrain and town. Oddly enough, you can even fly intoGreymane Manor and take some high angle shots of the interior.
So I’ve been exploring Gilneas. I’m still deciding where else I want to get shots of while I still have access. There’s a world out there, I want to see it.
…and yes, I’d totally do the same thing in real life if I could fly (OK, and if I had the time). I’d take a camera and fill up a few memory cards every few days.
Anyway, here are some of my Gilneas shots, and a couple of real world photos, just for fun. This is a great time of year for treephotos.
RT @TheAmishDude: Did the Obama administration really get the phone records of James Rosen's parents? If so, we've gone past Nixonian stra… 4 hours ago
