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  Stress 10:20 AM -- Tue June 14, 2005  

So much to stress over in the last week before moving. We signed a lot of fancy documents yesterday. I'm getting really concerned about moving money to where it needs to be when it needs to be (why on Earth aren't wire transfers instant? How does it take days to flip bits in 2 computer's databases?).

And here's the sad sad sad story. This has been the biggest mess of all. From talking to the guy who built the house (and who lives a few miles from it), we got the impression that DSL was available at the house. That impression was false (my other impression was that he wasn't really a computer guy, so he probably just has dialup). After researching the options, I came up with satellite. Which I then realized was a terrible idea and panicked and called them back quickly enough to avoid paying the FOUR HUNDRED DOLLAR cancellation fee (not too big compared to the SIX HUNDRED DOLLAR setup fee). Satellite is much faster than dialup for downloading, slightly faster than dialup for uploading, and costs $70 a month. The other little tidbit? Since you're beaming info to a satellite, it has horrific latency. That means that even though you get data quickly, the data doesn't begin coming until as much as 1 second (or maybe even longer sometimes) after you ask for it. That's nothing if you're surfing the web, but it means no online gaming! Even dialup will do better for that. So for now, we're on dialup out there. Probably mainly because we are spending an awful lot on this house and could use some time to let the wallet cool off. From that dialup, I hope to discover that ISDN or something is possible and reasonable. There's no really great sounding options, thanks to our backwoodsyness.

Guess we'll be roughing it! Well, presumably this will make me highly productive. I sure remember the last time I was highly productive - I lived all by myself in San Luis Obispo, using a 33.6 modem. Man, did I crank out the games in those days. Of course, the difference is that now I have to spend 48 hours a day downloading spam. Which is a lot of hours. For a lot of spam.

And hey, get those Monthly Merge levels in! We haven't had many entries this month, presumably due to Summer Silliness. I sure hope next month is bigger.
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  Mookies 04:43 PM -- Fri June 10, 2005  

So I was going to tell you, and I will. Mookies came about because of Tin Chef. Tin Chef is a game my wife and I play (very rarely), obviously based on Iron Chef. The rules are simple. One person is the host, and the other is the chef. The host picks 5 ingredients out of the pantry, fridge, and elsewhere, any 5 things. The chef then has 24 hours to think about them and prepare a fabulous meal with the following constraints: 4 of the 5 ingredients must be used, you can use any other ingredients you wish, but at least 2 of the host-picked ingredients must be used in a primary capacity (so you can't just make something totally different with a hint of the 5 ingredients thrown in). You're not limited to one course, you can make a dinner and dessert, or whatever. It's fun to do, and the real goal is to use up that obscure stuff that never seems to get used in the back of the fridge and cupboard.

So, in preparation to move, we played Tin Chef for the first time in years. First, I provided Sol with the ingredients - a bell pepper, a can of Southwest Pepper Jack soup, a bag of dried pinto beans, a box of cannelloni type noodle shell things, and a bag of frozen berries. What with having a "job" or whatever, she couldn't manage them all during the half hour or so she gets to spend at home each night, so she ignored the pasta and the berries (sadly, no berry dessert for me), and created a dip out of the rest. We had nachos that night, with dip.

Then, a week later, she set me up with ingredients - a granny smith apple, egg noodles, balsamic vinegar, the dying remnants of the honey (which needed to be heated up to return to some semblance of non-graininess), and something I'm forgetting. I probably didn't use the one I forgot, because I know I used the other 4. I created 2 dishes. You know I take gaming seriously, so I went on the web looking for recipes. I found this to cover most of the ingredients: Asian Noodle Salad With Chilies & Peanuts. We didn't have any jalapenos, so I just put in bell peppers, and I didn't realize we DID have peanuts, so sadly those went amiss too. All in all, it was bad. But also, to use the apple (and to finish off the honey), I made Apple Oat Sesame Cookies, which were good! Really good. But they were a surprise, because they're not like any cookie I've ever seen. You know what they're like? Remember on Seinfeld, when Elaine was going nuts for the tops of muffins, and eventually made a restaurant or something that only sold muffin tops, and threw away the rest? Well these cookies taste just like the tops of muffins! Soft and chewy. They're even shaped like it. So they are now called "mookies", for muffin-cookies. Real good, try them. I actually ended up having to substitute about half the ingredients, so maybe if you have the actual real ingredients, they're terrible, but I sure liked them the way I made them.

And now you know. The house is still the big ruckus in our lives. We have now cleaned out and sealed off a bathroom, two closets, and the guest room (I use the term "we" loosely... I may have been busy elsewhere at the time this stuff happened). Unfortunately, that's the sum total of rooms we CAN empty out and close off and still live here in relative comfort. Looks like we may be moving next Saturday, so we have to continue in squalor and confusion for 1 more week. Moving is awful, you should never do it. Ever. Just stay put. Play some Guild Wars! It's fun.
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  ITunes 12:13 PM -- Tue June 7, 2005  

The "Hamumu Is Currently Listening To" above is dead because I've been listening to internet radio through ITunes lately! I got tired of hearing the same couple thousand songs over and over (that's a lot of songs to get tired of!), so I'm radioing it. And that's important to me. I haven't listened to radio in maybe a year other than very occasional bits in the car, which means I never find out about new music. New music is good!!

The house buy/sell is moving along. We actually got to meet the guy we're buying from this weekend. He took us around the house showing us how things work and discussing the things we wanted fixed (a very short list). He was really cool - he built the house! Well, not entirely, it's a manufactured home, but he built the garage and put the house up and all that. And he really went above and beyond all over it. It's quite a wonderful house and property both.

But that house thing is very involving. I can't believe how much junk we have! We're stashing stuff in the garage, and have it half full, but most of our stuff is still somehow in the house. It's like it's just a bottomless fountain of books, clothes, and assorted baubles that are just slightly too important to throw away.

Haven't done anything concrete on the Ninja game as a result (and yes, Guild Wars is still a bit addicting), other than looking around for an artist. No results from that yet. What keeps me from working on the game is that the next thing is to implement the enemy AI. I even know just what I want to try, but it's just kinda scary and daunting. Luckily, there's plenty to keep me occupied in other directions with this house. We've run ourselves out of stamps with all these escrow papers, I have to go get more today.

I did have interesting things to blog upon, but now I've said too much, so later. I'll tell you about Tin Chef and mookies!
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  Craziness 05:36 PM -- Tue May 31, 2005  

Craziness #1 - It turns out that CTRL-...something (maybe I?), or something like that, instantly closes Firefox without any warning at all. Maybe it just crashed. So there goes my original attempt at a journal entry!

Craziness #2 - What I had been writing about was that we have sold our house and are currently in escrow (which means we haven't really sold it yet, and things could still go horrifically wrong), and it's blowing my mind. I can't stand all this paperwork and complex garbage. Why on earth does it take all this to transfer items between people who clearly want to transfer these items? It's utterly insane! I know the banks need to get all the stuff they need to trust us with these large sums of money and all that, but should it really take a month of shuffling papers back and forth? Why can't we sit down at a desk with the people we're selling to and buying from and some kind of House Transfer Dude, and get this hashed out in an hour? It hurts my brain. For that matter, why not just one page right on the front of the huge wad of house-selling papers that says "I hereby certify that I read all those pages there, and agree to every one of them, all at once! Signature X______", instead of initialling and signing upwards of 200 different places (that's not an exaggeration, in case you have never dealt with house buying, it's real!).

So that, along with of course Guild Wars, is what's keeping progress slow these days. But hey, tomorrow we announce the winners of the last Monthly Merge, and begin the next one (oops, I haven't figured out what it will actually be yet!), and release some new add-ons, and begin the Summer Silliness. Since so many people have already posted names, I'm just going to skip that step entirely. If you have names you want to propose for Summer Silliness, get them in on the forum before tomorrow. I'm also gonna whip through the voting this time, one week at the most. You know, Summer Silliness really doesn't inspire me. I'm much more a Halloween Horror kinda guy. And Monthly Merge for that matter, which I think is really fun.

New news on Ninja game? There are now these poles that stick out of the wall, and if you hit them while jumping, you begin spinning around them like a gymnast. Tap the button to jump off in the direction you're going. I like them. There's also a nifty glowy time-travel effect. Time travel, you say? What?! Could that relate to anything else you've heard lately? Surely not.
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  Hail Seitan! 11:18 PM -- Mon May 30, 2005  

Hey, today I made my own meat! In a way. I made seitan, which is nothing but wheat flour. You knead it underwater a bunch to get everything but the gluten out, and it ends up stringy/chewy/rubbery (those all sound like bad things I suppose... it ends up meaty, okay?). It makes a great fake meat, we just had it for dinner! It's not the best fake meat I ever had, but it's definitely great, especially considering I made it myself, and considering that 'real' fake meats cost a lot of money. I really hope to do this again a bunch. It was actually quite a bit of work for a reasonably small amount of results, though. But it was really cool to turn nothing but flour and water into something that was like meat. And I loved it! I better go put it away now that it's had a chance to cool off. Adios, blog you manana.
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  Rockin And Rollin 05:30 PM -- Tue May 24, 2005  

What's up lately... I've been trying to put Ninja Academy on the Mac through a myriad of ridiculously weird problems (because the Mac is ridiculously weird). As of now, it is ported, it runs great... but I can't seem to figure out how to build it into a finished release with all the attached files. So I'm working on that. When I finally have this all figured out, I will officially be only 99% clueless on the Mac.

I'm also working on Super Happy Go Go Ninja Time. Just design things right now, and I contacted an artist but have not heard anything back. But it's serious design things and it's really shaping up, I think.

Of course, it's all slow going since I'm also working VERY hard on Guild Wars. Other notes: we now have the new CDs for Supreme, Kid Mystic, and Loonyland. I really need to clarify the order page to reflect that stuff, since it is not a flat $5 charge for those games, but it still is for all others. We will most likely actually be discontinuing all the other CDs (but adding new ones for new games that come out), just because we don't sell enough of them to justify it! So for the time being, you can get the classic Hamumu cases, but time is running out. I wonder if there's any demand for signed copies... Other other note, still waiting on a sound fix for Loonyland Mac, then it will be released. Other other other note, June 1st will begin the Summer Silliness as well as the next Monthly Merge, so whee!
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  Latest stuff 02:23 PM -- Thu May 19, 2005  

I started working on porting Ninja Academy to the Mac yesterday and hit a wall trying to figure out how to use the stupid thing. I'm getting help and working on it again today. I'm also working on moving up from Ninja Academy to Super Happy Go Go Ninja Time, but more slowly there. Some planning to be done.

And of course, all of that is taking a backseat to the more important stuff - I just got a copy of Guild Wars, so it's time to obsessively level up for hours and hours a day! Still working though, just... not quite so much.

Loonyland for the Mac is done, but the developer is stuck with one last bug in the sound code somewhere. So it's just a matter of time! Well, I guess it's always a matter of time, but now it's a matter of less time than before.

So, that's what's up. Our house still won't sell. Why does nobody want our lovely lovely house!?
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  Belated Friday Cat Blogging 12:19 PM -- Sat May 14, 2005  


I wanted to introduce you to our new pal. See, the most ridiculous thing happened the other day - Some people were coming to look at our house (did I mention we're selling it? Apparently we are, since people are looking at it), and they came to me and asked "What's with the noisy cat?" I thought they meant Bonsai, since he's obnoxious, but I went to look, and lo and behold, there was a kitten outside our window just yelling and yelling like he wanted to come in. But we didn't know him. I kinda chased him away a little, but all throughout the day he'd come and yell in our windows.

Later, when more people were looking at the house, I went out in the backyard with them, and the kitten came over and started snuggling up on my legs and wouldn't leave me alone for a second. Eventually, you know how it went. He got to come in (which he was desperate to do), and he absolutely scarfed food faster than I've ever seen a cat do it - he was practically unhinging his jaw to shovel it in. I'm so glad he didn't throw up. We put him out later, but during the night, he yelled some more, and we let him in, and he curled up on our bed. So that was that.

We put up some signs, called the local vet to see if anybody knew anything, but we were okay with his owners not being found (with how starved he was, I have no idea when the last time he saw them was). So now he's our Oliver (get it?). And we have FOUR cats. That's ridiculous. But he needed us. It's funny how much he adopted us - he was never the least bit nervous about us, he just hopped right in. For the first few days, he spent all day in my lap as I worked. Those days he was sleeping almost all the time and eating the rest of the time, so he was obviously doing some heavy recovering. Now he's a lot more like a normal cat, but he still always sleeps on our bed and likes to be around us. You'd think he'd been with us for years. Several times we let him outside to see if he'd run off to wherever he belongs, and he did disappear the first time. Then 10 minutes later, he was yelling at a window on the other side of the house. So he wasn't ready to go anywhere.

The really nice thing is that the other cats don't mind him like they did Bonsai when he arrived. And best of all, he's a playmate/victim for Bonsai to wrestle with, which has really saved the other two. Hard to imagine, but adding another cat has made things more peaceful and made all our cats happier (despite some initial hissing... but not much!).
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  Dead Forum 12:46 PM -- Thu May 12, 2005  

Yep, I know the forum is down... something apparently went horribly wrong when I tried to upgrade it. I'm trying to get help now, who knows when it will be fixed! I just hope we don't lose anything. So anyway, hang out and play some Ninja Academy while you wait.
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  Sneak Peek: Ninja Academy 04:47 PM -- Wed May 11, 2005  


Well, it's done! With only 2 hours to spare before the deadline, I've hacked together something reasonably playable. It's definitely not what I wanted to accomplish, but it's a game, and with the deadline for the contest past, I can get to work turning it into a real game. It's gonna be really good when it's fully editable and has more interesting enemies and things. Here's a handy download link to try it out for yourself:
Ninja Academy (2 MB)
Be sure to drop by the Other Games forum to post your records. Can you even pass the Final Exam? I sure haven't yet.
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