I captured this video of Xandra with a glitchy gazelle on Impressive Title, and it was so mind-explodingly cute that I had to share it here.

A few interesting observations I've made using YouTube's Insight feature:

(Note: The Hot Spots feature displays a graph showing what portions of a video are being watched the most)

The Hot Spots graph for Memorable Lines and Moments from SQ6 shows a dramatic peak right before the clip where the narrator says, "Wow! This makes my nipples hard!", then steadily slopes downwards until the end of the video. Conversely, the graph for Part 2 bounces up and down but doesn't reach its highest point until near the very end.

The highest peak on Memorable Lines and Moments from SQ4 is when the clip where the player is smelling and tasting the Monolith Burger condiments (and getting responses from them) begins.

The Hot Spots graph for my Woodruff and the Schnibble montage trends gently downward for the first half of the video, then spikes at the point where Woodruff is escaping his padded cell.

The KQ7 Intro Storyboard's highest Hot Spots point is at the beginning of Rosella's solo, but it peters out shortly after the last line of the missing verse ends.

The first noticeable peak in the FPFP Outtakes video is right at the beginning of the sword fighting outtake, while the most dramatic dip is near the end of the same outtake. The highest peak is shortly afterward, around the time when Antonio growls, "Thatsa what I theenk of your lousy ants!"

Also, most of my Sierra videos have views primarily from the USA, but for some strange reason, most of the viewers of my Woodruff and the Schnibble video are from Spain, most of the viewers of my KQ7 Intro Storyboard video are from Germany and most of the viewers of my trailer for Adventure: The Inside Job are from Norway.


One more (somewhat related) thing: Death Gate is a damn good adventure game, and I'm not saying that just because I was able to complete it without any external hints whatsoever. It's not nearly as morbid as the title would suggest, and it has to be one of the most original fantasy adventures I've played. The puzzles are equally refreshing and original, and the various worlds of the game are wildly imaginative. This game was based on a series of books, but I'm a bit hesitant to read them, since whenever I've tried reading a book series that a game was based on, I've been somewhat disappointed, and I'm not sure if this third try will have the same result or not.

I think I've mentioned before that I love Roy Zimmerman's music.

So I'm just sharing the love here.

Jainism is probably the most non-violent, peaceful religion in the modern world. Its members believe in inflicting as little suffering as possible on other living beings, human and non-human, in order to reach a pure spiritual state. Jains are strict vegetarians, many of which don't even eat root vegetables like carrots and garlic because that would mean ending the life of the plant.

Some of its more devout members (in the past, at least) only eat fruit once it has dropped from a tree and wear cloth over their mouths when they are outside to keep them from accidentally inhaling flying insects. They even use a broom to sweep the ground in front of them clear while walking, so that whatever crawling lifeforms that might be in their way aren't stepped on.

And somebody has apparently put me on a mailing list for a Jain dating site.



WHAT?

Holy flame-broiled mother of Dionysus...

Apparently when Hell got frozen in Telltale Games' last Sam and Max: Season 2 episode, it froze over for real sometime afterward.

"Telltale and who Presents"!?!?

Elaine's eyes are green again! And Guybrush...

...has a BEARD! A visible BEARD!!

One of my High School English teachers said that Walt Disney has become this generation's prime storyteller. For many children (in the USA, at least), their first exposure to classic fairy tales like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast is through the Disney adaptations of the stories, which are often considerably different than the original tales.

On a topic directly related to (although not at all influenced by) this, I think that a YouTube video series comparing the Disney adaptations of pre-existing stories to the stories themselves would be a great idea (if such a thing doesn't exist already). Though a lot of the stories like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are pretty well-known and have been around for centuries, ones like 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone are based on more recent books, which are pretty obscure.

I just think it would be a nice way to educate folks who have never read the stories that Disney mangled somewhat in their movies. It may not be the most interesting subject for everyone, but I was interested to find out that Perdita had brown spots and wasn't Pongo's mate, Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law plotted to eat Beauty's children after Beauty and the prince were married, there were two genies in the story of Aladdin, and Arthur and Merlin confront a giant at one point in their adventures.

Using screenshots or footage from Disney's movies would undoubtedly get the videos taken down due to violation of copyright, so the video would probably have to be made up of original drawings or animations, which doesn't seem like that big a sacrifice.

Just an idea I had.

One evening, feeling utterly bored and not feeling like doing anything productive, I said to myself, "All right, I've played The Lion King PC game enough times to win it with my eyes closed. I want to play another action game with a non-human, quadruped protagonist."

After much searching, I found what I was looking for...

( Read more... )

Two years ago, someone requested that somebody make a version of Adventure Game Studio without the default font (which happens to be from Space Quest IV), since the prospect of making a free game that uses a font from a 17-year-old commercial one was causing him some moral conflict.

Two years later he resurrects his own thread and makes the same request, this time asking for a version that doesn't have MP3 support, advising all who read the thread to "Repent and turn from sin to God". Remarkably, one of the members of the forum was thoughtful enough to actually do what this person asked, creating an entire new version of AGS just so this person wouldn't have to be tempted to the default font or import MP3s into his game.

Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't it have taken a lot less time and effort for this person to, say, delete the default font and use one of the many others available to download? Or only use MIDIs or Ogg Vorbis files instead of MP3s?

And then he starts another thread essentially asking for a Christian version of AGS. When you start acting in such a way that even other members of your religion start criticizing you, I'd say it's time to step back and start re-evaluating things.


And just to show that I'm not completely full of negativity, after a month's absence, my tablet is finally back, fully repaired and almost good as new. It's been so long since I used it that I had to retrain my drawing hand for a bit.

Egad! Inscest has attacked several pictures on my TLKFAA gallery. He performed the following acts via picture comments:

1) Completely failed to grasp the satire directed at his ideas in a picture, despite the fact that everyone who commented prior to him did and said so (no surprise) and mistakenly stated that cub Vitani is supposed to have earstripes.
2) Posted a multi-paragraph statement saying that my theories are wrong based on his scant evidence (he says that I am wrong since all TLK lions inherit their mane colors from their fathers [even though Mufasa's mane is red and his father's is black]. He also states that Mohatu [Mufasa's grandfather] is Mufasa's father.)
3) Stated one of his unproven "facts" for the umpteenth time
4) Asked who the subject of an older picture is, despite the fact that the subject has already been identified by previous commenters.

Whatever shall I do?

Hmm...

I know! I believe I shall make another "TLK hypocrisy" picture, now that Inscest has inspired me yet again. (I know, it's completely juvenile, but hey, canon art is good, ne?)

I had an endocrinologist appointment today. She had my file open on her computer while she was talking to me, and I was occasionally glancing at the screen. Then I looked at the top of the window to see that there were several fields that had been filled in with various information about me: NAME, AGE, WEIGHT, SEX...and SPECIES.

This last field was blank, for some reason.

---

I recently got an email from someone who was asking my permission to link to WSSQUID Contd. from their page and asking if I could link back. The problem is that the page in question was a blog updated with news about new styles of sneakers being released. What in the world does a blog about sneakers have to do with a webcomic based on an old computer game series, a comic that stars one character who wears boots, while the other one is perpetually BAREFOOT?

(And yes, I know it's been a while since I've updated the strip. I'm working on some more, but my tablet is being repaired, so they may be even more delayed than I previously thought.)

---

MY mom's birthday was a little while ago, and as part of her party, we had a front page of a major newspaper from a date close to her birthday (no editions were released on the actual date) copied, enlarged, printed out and displayed. One of the headlines on the page reads "Woman Killed by Propeller of Big Airliner".

There's not much more that can be said about something like that.

---

Book title I noticed in a thrift store: If God Loves Me, Why Can't I Get My Locker Open?

Our little chicken was being such a character yesterday. She's the tiny black Bantam I might have mentioned before, and yesterday I let her out of her coop to wander around in the backyard while I knelt nearby, watching her. She was about an arm's length away from me, and I was eating a stick of string cheese. I recalled how we used to give the chicken pieces of cheese as a treat, so I broke off a tiny piece and dropped it in front of her.

She then started making this high-pitched, squeaky clucking that she makes whenever she's found something interesting when she's scratching around in the dirt and pecks the cheese up. Then she walks over to where I'm kneeling and starts rapidly pacing back and forth beside me, bobbing her head like an inquisitive pigeon and craning her neck to peer up at the cheese I'm still eating. After a few seconds of this, she flaps up onto my lap, so that she is now only a few inches from the cheese she has been coveting. Of course, I had to give her several more pieces then, and she didn't hop back down until the cheese was all gone.

It's at times like these that I suspect that even chickens, with their minuscule brains, are smarter than we give them credit for

I'm researching and hunting down games in preparation for Adventure: The Inside Job 2, as far off in the future as that game's completion might be. I'll be branching out into some new genres in this game, one of which is the action-adventure "hybrid" genre, and one of the games of that type that I've located is called a title from the mid-90's called Bermuda Syndrome.

The game's story? American World War II pilot goes through a wormhole into a parallel universe, accidentally saves sexy virgin princess from being sacrificed to a Tyrannosaurus rex, befriends her, then has to make his way through about 280 screens full of various prehistoric monsters, all of which he has to kill (as well as solve a few puzzles along the way).

Though there is a lot of action and combat in this game, it's not entirely overwhelming, and there are definite adventure game elements in it -- some problem solving is required to get across a crocodile-infested river, and a lot of lever-flipping is required to get through an ancient temple or two, but the "blow something away, progress to next screen, blow something else away" routine got a bit tedious after a while, especially since a lot of care had gone into the design of these dinos and I felt a bit bad about killing them -- most of them were actual dinosaur species, not just random scaly hodgepodges.

The thing I found most interesting about this game is the main character responsible for killing at least one of every form of life in this world. He's a muscular, crass, stubborn man, a true "ugly American", and his scantily clad female companion (who he kisses about seventeen times over the course of the game) is wearing what looks like a red bathing suit with one of her bosoms exposed for all the world to see. His name? Jack Thompson.

Not to be confused with this guy.

I am much amused by the irony.

My "'Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist' Outtakes" video on YouTube got spammed by a user named "canadianpharmacyshop", advertising cheap Canadian prescription drugs.

Good golly gosh, spam that doesn't seem all that out of place! Amazing.

It's New Year's Eve (well, in some parts of the world, anyway), and I've collected another collection of comments from our favorite stubborn, dense, immature, annoying troll wannabe, Inscest (not his real username).

( More inane TLK drivel )

I got to see some lovely birds at the local zoo today. I got a good look at some spectacular blue-crowned pigeons -- and don't let the "pigeon" label mislead you, these birds are BIG -- almost the size of chickens. In fact, they're the biggest pigeons in the world.

I also got to behold the equally spectacular male Palawan peacock pheasant (and his not-so-spectacular females), and I saw a couple of Luzon bleeding-heart doves* sunbathing. If you've never seen a bird sunbathing, it's a strange thing to witness. They lie on their side, barely moving and paying little attention to their surroundings, looking almost as if they're seriously ill. Survival instincts? What are those?

I also got to see a giraffe drinking, something which I don't think I've ever seen outside of nature documentaries. I was amused that when he/she was finished, instead of slowly easing out of that splayed, awkward, sloping position they always assume when drinking, he/she just did this little hop and quickly snapped both of its front legs together in a sort of ballerina-like move to become upright once more.

Sadly, I discovered that one of the zoo's more famous residents, Gemina the giraffe, died last January. Gemina had a deformity in her spine that put a sharp kink in her neck, yet she was able to live comfortably despite it. She was 21 years old when she died, which is apparently quite old for a giraffe. It won't be the same without her.


*[lame humor] Anyone else think that these birds are liberals? :] [/lh]

Oh goody, I got a Trojan horse and adware for Christmas. Thanks, Internet.

Another bizarre and unexpected gift I received: A pound of jellybeans.

Individually wrapped jellybeans.

...

Individually wrapped?

Nothing Christmassy at all about this entry unless you consider it as a gift of entertainment to the TLK fandom.

( Very long, pointless Lion King fanbabble under cut )