Monthly Archives: April 2009

PyWeek 8

Posted by on April 29, 2009 No comments

Well, somehow I decided to start pyweek 8 today, even though half of the time is already gone. Previously I was working as part of a team, coding some backend stuff for the pyedpypers group which was going well. Today, however, was a weird day, and we had some team drama. We flip flopped across a whole slew of decisions, with moral falling through the floor. We scrapped our old idea and started on a new one, but now part of the team is going back to the original. It is a little bit hectic.

Anyhoo, I really liked one of the new game ideas and am going to pursue it solo (it looks like each of our team members is doing a solo entry now). I already don’t have a ton of available time and it is way outside my comfort zone, so this should be a very interesting 3 days. I’m going to spend a bit more time tonight hacking stuff together then evaluate my situation tomorrow. I have to go to work this week and I have a couple important meetings, so for now it is all up in the air.

Keep an eye out for progress, if there is any.

Vegas, Work, Disc Golf, and Dive-Ins

Posted by on April 21, 2009 No comments

Updates!

I got back from Las Vegas last night and had an absolute blast. I’m trying my best to get back down there and waste some more money. I love everything about Vegas; I annoyed the hell out of my friends blathering about the beautiful mix of flashy gaudy bling and the seedy sex-driven underbelly. It doesn’t even try to hide it, which just makes it that much better.

We hit a lot of casinos, a strip club, and couple key restaurants, but my favorite thing about it was just sitting down at an empty table and playing blackjack with my buddy. We lost all our cash, but we had a hell of a time and a couple free drinks, so it still ended up being a great night. If only we could have gone home with that bachelorette party…

Anyway, as soon as I have enough money to move there, I’m going to. 24 hour buffalo wild wings, steak joints, gambling, and strip clubs make it my kind of town.

On to work! Today is 4/20, a classic day of debauchery, and to celebrate we stopped working at 4:20 pm and played beer pong (beirut) on the lower floor. One of the bosses (my mother!) came down mid-game, but just got out some patron silver instead of getting upset. It is a great place to work.

So, buzzing a bit from the beer (I only won a single game… wth), my roommate picked me up and we went disc golfing, where I threw my first hole in one ever. It wasn’t pretty — I threw a decent hammer that smashed into the ground a couple feet from the basket and bounced up and in. Dirty, but an Ace nonetheless. This led to a record round for me, shooting even at that course for the first time.

I rounded out the day with a stop at blockbuster where we picked up an average looking action movie and watched it in the hot tub, as usual. I just finished writing my first review for the site, but you’ll have to wait until the site is up and running to actually see it.

All in all a fantastic day.

A new project is born

Posted by on April 16, 2009 1 comment

For those of you who follow my twitter or facebook accounts, this is mostly old news. But to the rest of you…

A new project is on the horizon! Lately, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching movies from the hot tub. Quick synopsis: I recently bought a hot tub and put it on the other side of our large kitchen window. On the inside we’ve put the TV and rigged up a speaker that we can easily take outside. Recently I added this canopy/gazebo thing which let us watch during a heavy rainstorm yesterday and a surprise snowstorm today. Throw in some beer and the towel rack and it makes an incredible movie watching experience. Next paycheck I’ll be adding a 50″ plasma TV and some permanent outdoor speakers to make it truly ridiculous.

Now, for a couple years I’ve been wanting to create a casual movie review site that addressed some of the issues I have with most of the other review sites out there. My main problems with the other sites is that they are usually either an amalgamation of community reviews with no rhyme or reason, or they are the opinion of a single critic (or worse, the site is a collection of reviews by a few reviewers, but each item is reviewed by a single person). In my opinion, this is not an accurate or effective way to gauge the quality of anything.

So, to address this, I’ve been wanting to make a site where a few regular reviewers post intelligent reviews for each movie. Viewing a movie’s page shows you what each reviewer thinks about it, with both a blurb and some numerical rating systems. Naturally, each reviewer will have differing opinions, which is what makes this work; the value comes from the users’ ability to identify with a certain reviewer’s point of view, either wholly or on a category by category basis. As you read reviews, the site will track whose opinions your own views line up with, and can recommend movies to you based on that. It’s like having a friend who knows your tastes suggest movies to you because they know what kind of things you like.

I want to take this deeper than just an overall score and drill all the way down to a category level. For example: One thing I value more than most other people is that a story ‘plays by its own rules’. This is different than a story’s plausibility in our reality. Let me explain in detail. Part of every story told is the setting — in its broadest form it is the universe in which a story takes place. Every universe has a set of rules; for example, star wars is set in a universe powered by ‘the force’ where things like swords made of light are possible. I’m 100% fine with this. Where I start to get upset is when the characters do things (or don’t do things) that don’t fit the universe in which they live. Why oh why has no jedi just turned off his lightsaber in the middle of a fight, swung past the other jedi’s block, and turned it back on somewhere inside his opponent’s chest? Remember X-Men 3, when Magneto carries the golden gate bridge to alcatraz to land his army? I’m fine with magneto being able to do that; what frosts my balls is that he takes an army of mutants and sacrifices them on the marines there, instead of SMASHING THE ENTIRE ISLAND OVER AND OVER WITH THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE. They didn’t need anything there; all they wanted was to kill the kid inside. He just wouldn’t do it the way it happened in the movie – they simply put it there to make a fight scene happen. I see this as very sloppy and lazy writing. So, if you feel the same way I do about this kind of thing, the site can learn that maybe you identify with a reviewer X’s general movie ratings, but agree with my reviews specifically when it comes to continuity/plausibility (there is probably a great word for this that I don’t know).

That brings us back to the new project — I’ve been thinking about such a review site for a while, and I’m starting to watch tons of movies with a semi-regular crew of hot tub goers (hottubbers?). I’m already sharing my opinion of each flick with anyone within earshot, so I figure I might as well put it to good use and rope as friends in as I can. So I bought up diveinmoviereview.com and away we go.

I’ll be building the site one of these days, but for now I need two things: suggestions on what things are important in a movie review, and regular/semi-regular reviewers excited to watch a bunch of movies. It isn’t even critical that you watch them from the actual hot tub, but c’mon, if you have the opportunity, why wouldn’t you?

New Tutorial Update

Posted by on April 10, 2009 No comments

After almost two months of inactivity I finally sat down and hacked out some more code on the new tutorial game. I have one more major feature to implement and a couple minor ones and the game will be finished and I can actually start writing the tut.
Last time, we were just barely playable [...]

An Interesting Night Out

Posted by on April 7, 2009 No comments

Here comes a story boys and girls. For a teaser, the final score is 3 girls hit on (1 rejection, 1 too young, 1 prostitute), 0 brought home.

This weekend, I went out with my friend and his girlfriend, and some friends of hers. They decided they wanted to go to an 18+ club because it had a ‘hot girl competition’ they thought they could win. These girls are some of the cockiest I’ve ever met, but the scenery is nice so I suppose it evens out. And so the night began…

We showed up a bit late, luckily, and met our friends in line, cutting about 40 people (guys) in the process. There were some words with the guys we cut directly in front of, but some chummy chummy talk cooled them down immediately. After about a 10 minute wait in the cold we got to the front where they asked for our IDs and sent us to the bouncers who were searching us. The guy left my junk alone, but he dug through my shoes and got a solid grab of my ass while he was groping around (the most action I got all night, actually). After that we joined another line, where they IDed us at both the beginning AND the end (3 times so far). Another couple minutes pass and we make it inside.

First impression: Ecstasy. As in Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, not euphoria.

The place was very poorly lit, decorated in concrete and steel, and teeming with late-teen kids going to town on their pacifiers and whipping around the glowsticks being sold there for $3 each. To their credit, there were a few people who could actually make them look good, but they were the very small minority.

Anyhoo, we immediately headed for the bar, which was tucked away in a dingy corner, where they checked our IDs another time. I shelled out a ridiculous amount of money for a single pitcher and a long island, and we hit the horrible horrible pool tables. Meanwhile, some of the girls went off to sign up for the competition thing. At this point, I found the best looking girl in the bar (not saying much), and asked her to ditch the guys she was with and come be my partner against Matt and his girlfriend. She said she had a couple more games on that table and asked if I could wait, while informing me that she was with one of the bouncers. I said I couldn’t wait and went back to my table to trounce my friends at cutthroat (sorry matt!). Rejection + 1.

After we finished our super expensive beer we headed back out to the dance floor to get a look at the girls on stage. These girls, unlike the ones we came with, were prepared. Fluffy boots, TINY boyshorts, skimpy tops; it was wonderful. They jumped around to the crappy dance music and looked great doing it. To compete, many of the other girls just took their clothes off and were up there in their bras and panties — blame the iphone’s crappy camera for no good pictures to share.

So, the view was great, but with all the good looking girls up on stage, there was nothing but dregs on the floor. One fairly attractive girl walked by, so I stopped her and asked her why she wasn’t shaking her ass on stage. She laughed and said that “she didn’t go down for free”. I laughed along with (what I thought was) her stupid joke and we talked a bit more. A couple lines later, she said it again, at which point it clicked and I started laughing hard. She handed me her little card and told me her name was August. In between breaths I asked her if she would sign a big August on the back of the card, but I think she realized I wasn’t her john for the night and refused. The card now lives on our house whiteboard. Prostitute + 1.

At this point, all the girls we went with had realized they didn’t hold a candle to the young nubile ladies shaking around on stage, but one girl from our group was missing (Gabby). I had never met this girl before, so I just kind of stood around (facing the stage) while one girl freaked out and the other went looking for her. The freak out girl got so annoying that I finally just turned around and started asking random girls if they were ‘Gabby’. It was a surprisingly effective ice breaker — a couple ignored me, but two I asked gave me their names and asked me to cheer for their friend who was apparently on stage. Eventually, Gabby was found and had returned to the little group. I probably could have continued talking with the girls behind us, but they were no more than 18 or 19 and one was fat, so I just said goodbye and we left. Too young + 1.

After leaving the club we were planning on hitting the hot tub, but once we got back to my place Matt’s girlfriend went on a tirade against me, covering everything from the girls I hit on that night to my ‘gay glasses and golf shoes’ (I had on some fairly nondescript glasses and some nice white indoor soccer shoes). It was actually quite an impressive little rant, leaving the rest of us either entertained (me), disgusted (roommate), or embarrassed (Matt). In the awkward afterglow Matt rounded her up and they went home. I finished off a bottle of wine, told this story to those who hadn’t witnessed it first hand, and put the hooker’s card up on the board for posterity.

Things we learned:

  1. It is surprisingly satisfying to have extremely arrogant girls put in their places by hot young tramps dancing around barely clothed (It is one of those win-win situations where I win twice).
  2. I think I’m not a huge fan of club dancing because even the people who are ‘good’ at it look incredibly stupid doing it.