The main reason is the tremendous power it gives to the individual. I am not talking about reading the anarchy cookbook and blowing stuff to bits, but simply the nature of how it connects a LOT of people.

It constantly feels like an insanely huge infinite tappable power source. There is just so much opportunity to achieve things with the internet. If I create something on the internet that relies on human input (ie social networking), I have instant access to millions of mouse-clicks across the globe interacting with whatever I made.

Be it an experiment to understand the human psyhce, or just creating a viral YouTube hit.

Can I marry it?

I was 15 then.

Ambivalent Quarrellings

Needless to say, like any blog starter, it got lost in the void and recesses of cyberspace… There is no cobwebs in that parts of the world, only dates to remind you how it aged. I don’t plan on deleting that blog (ever). I like looking back into clear-cut snippets of my life and thanks to the internet it is possible. I like it because I can look back and see what I was like, perhaps remembering how I lived back then.

One of my previous iterations of my site (in PHP-Nuke) was hacked and thus I lost several blogposts from it. I also broke my first forum (in which people actually posted somewhat).

But this blog is still going…

Music update:

Been working on the new EP. It might become an album. I just haven’t had the need to release it now. Me and my bro are also going to see if we can jam some proper songs this coming holidays. Lots of our previous work we are going to try and transpose. More emphasis will be placed on voices/singing though.

Games update:

Been secretly experimenting with different prototypes of the Roach Toaster gameplay. Me and 2 friends are also going to make a game which involves ninjas and ropes (so far). I can’t do the crazy physics programming so I’m helping with the design and ultimately level design.

Website update:

Still working on my new mini-project. I should just get around to finishing it. Shouldn’t be tooo long. The problem is that the first phase of the project is pretty boring. The 2nd phase which I don’t even know how I would do it, should be way more interesting. But why am I telling you this if you don’t know what it is about? Meh.

They managed to compare Roach Toaster to the infamous Muslim Massacre! While Muslic Massacre garnered media attention because of its controversial nature, Roach Toaster didn’t, simply because it is a game about “toasting” roaches…

Gameology then continues to dissect Roach Toaster for any underlying political and racial undertones. Considering that I am a white South African, they proclaim that Roach Toaster was created to portray the “white elite” crushing the hordes of “blacks”. Something along that line.

Read it!

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I don’t really know what to think about it. Firstly its awesome to see someone dissect me and my game, but it is so farfetched at the same time. I clearly created the game purely for being a game. If I wanted to make a political statement I would’ve done so by simply making the roaches black people.

Somewhere in it all there might contain an unintentional political statement, considering that the game idea DID come from watching a riot on TV… But I’m sure that if I wasn’t living in South Africa and saw a riot on TV, the same idea would’ve followed.

I love thinking up names. I really do. I love keeping it short, yet having some sort of pun in it somewhere. If I can’t do that, then at least something that sounds good on the tongue, like Roach Toaster.

The problem with thinking up web-related names is that there is only so many available URLs, which pretty much defeats the purpose of trying to be clever, since some random cyber-squatter managed to reap the name out from under your feet.

At rAge they released the new Dev.Mag up for grabs at its usual spot. This issue is filled with awesome, from an interview with Introversion, level design article, working with audacity and my favourtite, a retrospective article on the Game.Dev comps. It starts with the first 10 comps.

It makes me want to get back into the swing of things again!

I quote:

“This particular competition produced one of the finest games of Game.Dev’s early era – an offering titled Roach Toaster which stood head and shoulders above the rest of the entries up until that point and raised the bar for all competitions that followed. It didn’t have mind-blowing graphics. It didn’t have a load of flashy scripted events. It didn’teven have sound effects. It just had a basic roach generation algorithm and a few well-balanced roachbusting tools that were meticulously considered; providing a player with a simple experience that felt like an epic.”

It makes me brim with joy.

Get the Dev.Mag now! Its awesome!

It has been downloaded more than 100 times now. The link comes from the Baidu MP3 search engine which explains it. I can’t read it, so I don’t quite know how it got there or how it works or whatever. I wish I knew.

But, its awesome seeing the “hits” on it go up.

I would say it is definitely my best song I have ever made (alongside Flight of the Rift and Empty Night Sky).

Talking about music. Since Crag, I’ve been making music on and off and I have probably a dose of about 6-7 songs. Not all of them is that good. I will probably release a new compilation somewhere before the end of the year.

Searching the index of the world is kinda weird. I am nowhere on the net. I only started using the net more regularly around 2003. I was 12 in 2001. What business would I have on the net then? I was playing Pokemon for crying out loud.

Compared with the Internet Archive, we have literally entered a time portal!

But after some searching I find it truly amazing to see just how much our world has changed in only 7 years’ time. I find it exciting how fast our times are moving. Today, where things like YouTube, Facebook and the Ipod permeate our existence, it didn’t even exist then.

I would like to take this opportunity to toast my future self, because he is living in a much more awesome time. Who knows what awesome lies around the corner in these times of rapid change!

It is MUCH less cluttered. The previous version had a nasty clutter at the top. You did not quite know where your eyes had to look when greeted with the page. It is now much more simplistic and “accesible” with a clear “add quote” on the bottom.

It is also much more “facebook” app friendly now. I’ll get around to properly implementing a facebook app version of lolstupids.com somewhere in the december holidays.

Tell me what you think? Better?

P.S. Next in line for lolstupids.com is implementing a feature that emails people when your quote has been approved.

But today, something weird happened which made me specalute on what data Facebook keeps. A few years ago, I met a girl, and I searched for her on facebook. She wasn’t on it and I forgot about it.

Today, she crept up in my “People You May Know” feature… I always thought that the feature simply checked your mutual friends and location data. I clicked on her name to see how many mutual friends we had… NONE. Now, she stays in the same city as me, but there are tons of people in this city. There is no reason she should’ve crept up in the “People You May Know” feature. When I checked how many friends she had, she only had 2!

Now, the only reason I can think how it got there was that I searched for here a year or 2 ago!

Kinda weird if you ask me. They don’t quite stipulate it. I’ve always been an advocate of relegating privacy for comfort and ease of use, but I think web companies should stipulate what data they store… (Maybe they do somewhere).