July 2008 Archives
Do you think that Microsoft could have chosen a better freeze frame for this Vista flash ad?
To answer your question, poorly punctuated ad1, either they are bored by it or they find it delicious.
The ad is part of “The Mojave Experiment,” Redmond’s new marketing effort in which they lock people in a room with a Microsoft representative and ask them what they think about imaginary new Microsoft products. Miraculously, the people like them! The Vista people must have been thrilled when one subject talked trash about the competitors without prompting—she looks like she is going to puke when she says the word “Mac.”
I think that another participant has a bright viral video career ahead of him on the basis of facial hair alone.
Either that is one spectacularly round beard or the guy cut the brim off a baseball cap and pasted it to his face. Assuming the former, my unironic compliments. I am mesmerized. Throw this guy in some wacky situations and you’ve got YouTube gold. It practically writes itself.
My Google Analytics report registered an uptick in visitors from Spain last week, which I ignored, but then the Spanish kept on coming, and I got curious. My findings: Geek Out New York is incredibly super-famous in Spain. Why? Because I’m mentioned in a recent episode of the Spanish tech vlog La Dosis Diaria on mobuzz.tv.
Apparently the tidal wave of buzz from my December post about ToyTokyo is only now reaching the Iberian Peninsula. My shining moment starts at the 3:57 mark (brought to you by Cutty Sark Whiskey, the choice of all the geeks in Barcelona, I assume), but the whole thing is worth watching, especially the IM A FUCKING GEEK segment.1
According to Analytics, visitors from Spain spend an average of 7 seconds on GONY. So welcome, my Spanish friends! Hope you like—oh, OK, see you later, then.
Right after I finished nostalgizing (not a word) the wristwatch gaming of my youth, I got word that another vestige of my primary-school days has resurfaced: Nickelodeon has rereleased many of their 1990s classics to the iTunes Store. (You can find them all in the Nick Rewind channel—that link won’t work if you don’t have iTunes.)
The new uploads include the first season of Hey Dude, the sitcom set at the Bar None Ranch. Oddly, Salute Your Shorts, Dude’s summer-camp counterpart, is not among the selections (yet). This would have baffled my fourth-grade class, in which it was accepted wisdom that Salute Your Shorts was the superior program. Hey Dude was stupid, dumb, and “unrealistic.” To admit fandom of the show was tantamount to carrying your backpack with both straps instead of just one. Nobody dared invite the ostracization that would result from either transgression.
So it was with quiet shame that, on lonely weekday afternoons, I might draw the curtains and tune in to a half-hour of ranch-themed entertainment. Nobody could know that, in truth, I found Hey Dude to be a serviceable show, on par with Salute Your Shorts. The fear of retribution remains, but I remain in the shadows no longer. It’s time to come forward.
I liked Hey Dude.
(Bonus embarrassing secret: It always bothered me that there is no comma in the title.)
If you never saw the show as a kid—perhaps because you were too much of a coward to furtively stand against peer pressure—these episode synopses from the iTunes Store may entice you.
“Ted’s Saddle”: Ted’s selfishness and desire for a saddle that once belonged to John Wayne get him in trouble.
“Goldilocks”: Buddy Ernst finally finds something to like at the ranch, a yellow-maned pony named Goldilocks.
“Pain in the Neck”: Ted’s fascination with girls sends Danny crashing to the ground from a tall ladder.
“Rehearsal for Romance”: Sixteen-year-old Melody’s fondest wish comes true when a “college man” asks her out on a date.
Uh, wow, what a weird show.
Defender of the Favicon is a remake of the video game Defender for the tiniest canvas imaginable. The game takes place in the site’s favicon—that 16x16-pixel square to the left of your browser’s address bar. (GONY’s is a slate-blue “G.”) Here’s a screenshot:
Defender of the Favicon is practically unplayable. The screen is too small (obviously), the controls are jerky, and it bastardizes an arcade classic. Yet I sure did enjoy playing it. For some reason, games are much more fun when played in a medium that was not designed to support games. DOTF reminds me of the wristwatches they made when I was in grade school that could play mini-games on their primitive LCDs. The games would not have impressed us in any other context, but HOLY CRAP THAT KID’S WATCH IS A GAME!
“Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can’t create it if you don’t have one.”1
Geek Out
Get animated. I used to love heading to one of the campus theaters at the end of the term in college to watch the fruits of the animation students’ labors. Inspired animation has a way of flaunting its creator’s ingenuity and hard work without seeming too showy about it. Maybe we’re predisposed to appreciate the craft because it seems so magical in the first place. Amateurs and pros alike will be flaunting their magic at the 2008 Animation Block Party, which opens tonight at Automotive High School (50 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn) and continues through the weekend at BAM Cinématek (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave.).
(The film above, Escargo by Hubert Chan, was shown at the 2007 Block Party. Chan has another short, Taxi Guy, in this year’s festival.)
Geek In
Howl. Who says the alpha geeks at FOO Camp should have all the fun? You don’t have to be able to solve Werewolf to enjoy it. Get together a large group of people (at least 6, larger numbers are better), assign roles, and revisit the age-old conflict between man and werewolf. There are plenty of rules sheets around to get you started. I recommend trying plain-vanilla Werewolf until you know the ropes, and then add in variants like seers, healers, etc. Then invent your own twists. The great thing about Werewolf is all the add-ons are free.
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According to Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, among others. Bird was also more responsible than most realize for establishing the look of The Simpsons in its heyday. ↑
The cover of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection—a game for PS2, Wii, and PSP that recreates a bunch of classic pinball machines from the late 1970s to the early ’90s—depicts action on Williams’ 1990 Funhouse machine. It’s the right choice: Of all the pinball machines in this game, Funhouse is the most beloved. The reason is Rudy, the smartass carnival barker whose head pokes through the upper playfield. Rudy’s eyes and mouth move as he speaks, he screams when the ball hits him, and if you time it correctly, you can shoot the ball down his gullet to shut him up.
A Williams promo flyer for Funhouse, issued in advance of the machine’s original release, boasted that “Pin-Mation makes pinball come alive!” and the claim was accurate insofar as the mechanical Rudy toy imbued the game with a memorable personality. Rudy was marvelous as a flesh-and-blood (i.e., steel-and-plastic) machine, but is that tangibility crucial to his “wow” factor? Does his appeal translate to a 3-D replica on a TV screen?
Of course, it’s not just about Rudy. The overriding question of Pinball Hall of Fame: TWC is whether or not pinball, the ultimate kinetic arcade game, can make the jump to video without losing its soul. I was skeptical. There have been good pinball video games—I cut my teeth on LittleWing’s Crystal Caliburn and Loony Labyrinth—but none that I would call especially realistic. The ball is always too floaty, or too big, or just not quite right.
After a few weeks of play, I will grudgingly admit that the ball in TWC acts truer to life than any other pinball game I’ve played. It is superb. And that’s not all they got right. What most delights me about TWC is that they nailed the oft-ignored flipper feel, too. Flipper technology has changed through the decades, and while Williams was renowned for having the smoothest flipper mechanics, there is still a wide range of “feel” across their games historically. (To learn more, do a Google search for Williams Fliptronics.) The Black Knight flippers feel leaner and a touch snappier than the Funhouse flippers, just like they do on real, well-maintained machines.
The tables have been so painstakingly replicated that when I have a high-scoring game going, I get some vestige of the rush I’d get in the arcade. My pulse quickens to match the rhythm of the machine, my finger wobbles on the flipper button before that jackpot shot—it’s exciting. (The spot-on “nudge” controls help a lot with this.)
The strongest sensation I get from TWC, though, is a renewed urge to play the real machines. That’s perfect. People should be playing the real machines. So if you have an itch for pinball, TWC half-scratches it. I wouldn’t ask for anything more or less.
And yes, CGI Rudy is almost as delightful as the original.
The Machines
TWC reproduces eight classic Williams machines.1 Here’s a rundown in order of original release. Titles and photos are linked to the corresponding pages in the Internet Pinball Database.
Gorgar (1979): This was the first widely available pinball machine whose main character talked. He couldn’t say much, so Williams wisely decided to make him a demon character. That way, phrases like “ME GORGAR!” would sound evil rather than stupid. The playfield has a pretty standard layout—a couple banks of drop targets, pop bumpers at top center—but the camp value of the art and sound make the overall package something special. (The backglass is particularly sweet.) Gorgar comes at the tail end an era that placed an emphasis on racking up bonus points (which are tallied after the ball drains). That’s always a change for somebody like me, brought up on the games of the late ’80s and ’90s, where you score the vast bulk of your points while the ball is in play.
Firepower (1980): Of the eight machines in this list, Firepower was the best selling, but it’s my least favorite. It’s a good machine, but the wide-open playfield doesn’t match my tastes, and the art hasn’t aged well. Extenuating good points: When you activate multiball, this machine features an understated countdown to “launch” that still gets the adrenaline flowing. Firepower was the first machine to feature the lane change feature, a minor but immensely helpful innovation.
Black Knight (1980): Created by legendary pinball designer Steve Ritchie (who also designed Firepower), Black Knight has a fantastic flow to it. It’s a pleasure to get a good rhythm going, weaving balls through the split-level playfield. The hallmark gizmo on BK is Magna-Save, a pair of player-activated magnets that can keep your ball from slipping down the outlanes. The speech synthesis is borderline incomprehensible, but my compliments to the developers of TWC for resisting the temptation to clean up the distorted dialogue. Like Funhouse, this is a game remembered by many former arcade rats who wouldn’t change a thing about it.
Space Shuttle (1984): When I was playing this one with my wife, I felt obligated to say, “Remember, this was when space was cool.” I love the clean, 1980s hi-tech styling on this game and its unabashed “USA! USA!” spirit. The sequence of play if smart: The player is forced to make dangerous side shots to lock balls for multiball, and if you survive this part, you get a gratifying, easy shot straight up the middle to blast off. I don’t know why this machine never matched the popularity of Firepower. I guess people find it more exciting to fire off a rocket than to launch the cute little shuttle.
PIN-BOT (1986): Great, great machine. You use the ball to activate a robot and collect energy and by the way, you’re exploring the solar system, too. They were too busy packing robot-space coolness into this pin to bother making any sense. This is the only table that I noticed playing much differently than it does in the arcade. The sensors on Pin-Bot’s teeth are typically a little twitchier in real life than in TWC’s simulation, so in an arcade, it’s easier to open Pin-Bot’s visor and install his eyes. See what I mean about not making sense?
Taxi (1988): A fun pin with two swooping, easy-to-shoot ramps near the middle of the playfield and two small, very difficult ramps on the edges. The only pinball machine to my knowledge that prominently features Mikhail Gorbachev. (Gorbie is one of the passengers you pick up, along with Dracula, Santa Claus, Pin-Bot, and Lola, a Marilyn Monroe type.)
Whirlwind (1990): Pat Lawlor created Whirlwind and Funhouse. He then created the best-selling pinball machine of all time, The Addams Family. After that, he created what many pinheads think is the greatest machine ever, The Twilight Zone. Pat Lawlor is deserving of your worship. Whirlwind’s gimmick is a set of three plastic discs embedded in the playfield that spin rapidly when you achieve certain goals, diverting your ball in a tornado-like fashion. Classic Lawlor chicanery.
Funhouse (1990): I made my love for Funhouse clear up top, so I’ll just say that the little ditty that plays during Superdog mode is one of my favorite pinball tunes of all time. Catchy.
Now go play pinball!
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The Wii and PSP versions have ten tables—Jive Time and Sorcerer are only available on these platforms—but I bought the PS2 version. I don’t know why the developers didn’t include all the tables in the PS2 version, but they picked the right ones to leave out, at least. ↑
Game theorist/designer Jane McGonigal (no relation to McGarnagle) played Werewolf all night at O’Reilly’s FOO Camp 2008. Her secret aim was to test optimal strategies for the popular party game. Werewolf is a simple game of deception. Players are randomly assigned roles as “villagers,” who are trying to root out the werewolves in their midst, and (naturally) “werewolves,” who try to pick off the villagers one by one. If you’ve never played it before, peruse a rules sheet—there’s no learning curve. You might also know the game as Mafia, and the commercial card game Bang! is a variant of the same concept.
Theorists often endeavor to “solve” a game—to determine a strategy for a given game that will prove successful 100% of the time. Last year, for instance, the developers of the checkers-playing computer program Chinook announced that they had solved checkers. Chinook cannot be beaten; the worst any player can do against it is a draw. The checkers solution took decades of work, but not all games are so irascible. The tic-tac-toe solution, for instance, fits on a business card and can be intuited by a grade-schooler. At the other end of the spectrum, chess and go are regarded as unsolvable in practical terms.
McGonigal developed what she thought was a near-optimal strategy for villager play in Werewolf, and she wanted to try it out with her fellow geeks and gamers at FOO Camp. (Developing an optimal strategy for a game isn’t exactly the same as solving it in game theory terms, but for the purpose of this article, it’s close enough.) Her peers reacted violently, and McGonigal’s story is a great case study in the collision of game theory and intuition. The three-act drama that plays out is a typical cycle of reaction to a game “solution.”
1. Someone calls B.S. Despite foreknowledge that McGonigal is a very intelligent person with a deep knowledge of game theory (she’s one of the game world’s leading thinkers, conducting most of her work under the auspices of Avantgame), her peers reject her idea out of hand. McGonigal’s optimal strategy depends on the player in the “seer” role1 declaring herself at the earliest opportunity, an unorthodox tactic. She was asking players to reveal a key piece of information in a game that seems to rely on playing things close to the vest. Writes McGonigal:
I tried to introduce the other players to the Ultimate Optimal Seer Strategy. It was NOT well received! OMG. They thought I was crazy, crazy wrong. It was SO counter-intuitive. They went through all the arguments: It was too dangerous for a seer to come out in the first round, you couldn’t count on the healer to heal them, the werewolves could be too tricky … and so on. … I was so mad that I scrawled across the whiteboard “THE HEALER NEEDS TO LEARN MATH!!!!!” in the middle of the “night”, and once the healer got picked off, he and I and another dead villager went out in the hall and had a raging argument.
If you’ve ever tried to explain the Monty Hall Problem to a skeptic, you’ll recognize this reaction. Cognitive dissonance, counterintuitive, whatever you call it, passions are inflamed by this type of stuff. People understandably do not enjoy having some know-it-all question their fundamental conception of a game.
2. The experiment. Here is where the game theorist uses her doubters’ passion against them. “Maybe you’re right. Just humor me and try it my way.”
The argument was only settled 5 games later … five games in which we had agreed to test the strategy and saw the villagers win perfect games lasting about 10 minutes each (that’s really short!!!).
3. The buzzkill. This is the part that fascinates me. A good, easy-to-explain optimal strategy will often, in the eyes of the players, “ruin” the game. Like revealing the secret behind a magic trick, it’s just not as much fun anymore.
In fact, after that point, when it was conceded by all that from a game theory perspective this was really ridiculously effective, we had to stop playing with that strategy. It was too boring to be that good of a village!
Werewolf has a strong social/cooperative component to it, as does McGonigal’s optimal strategy, so while I’m a little surprised that these analytical types could put the genie back in the bottle like that, I also see how they managed to pull it off. It’s not like tic-tac-toe, where you couldn’t “play dumb” just to make the game fun again.
I was gratified, though, to read on and learn that McGonigal et al. also went forward by innovating and creating new ways to play the game. (Check out the comments on McGonigal’s post for further rules variations.) In my eyes, this is how it should work. The necessitation of exploration and discovery is the real benefit of game theory and “solving” games. Games were meant to be solved. In the long term, intuiting out the best strategy is the most gratifying part of gameplay anyway. And when solutions arise, I have faith we’ll always come up with new ideas and new games.
To extend the magic parallel, many magicians balked when Penn & Teller did the cups-and-balls trick with clear plastic cups, but the upshot of exposing the dusty old tricks is that magicians are forced to come up with new magic. Likewise, when an inspired game theorist like McGonigal “ruins” a classic game, she’s really just creating a vacuum, an opportunity for innovation (one she and her friends quickly seized). Don’t be afraid to break your games; when they heal, they always end up stronger than before.
(P.S.: Thanks to reliable reader Johnny for the tip.)
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The seer is a villager who is allowed to watch as the werewolves decide who to kill. All of the other villagers are required to keep their eyes closed during this “nighttime” stage of the game. ↑
“Life is wasted on the living.”1
Sometimes GONY is my day job; sometimes it’s not. This week was one of the latter cases, so apologies for the posting schedule (or lack thereof). At the end of a long Wednesday, I shared a cab with a guy (named Guy!) who was going in the same direction. He said that he’d just finished with his Wednesday ritual: After work he heads to St. Mark’s Comics, purchases a bunch of new issues, and then retreats to the back of his favorite pub to have a few beers and enjoy his comics in peace. The rest of our conversation went about like this:
Guy: I know, it sounds really boring.
Me: No, it doesn’t. It sounds great!
Guy: Yeah, yeah, it’s boring.
[repeat ad infinitum]
Geekery is wasted on the geeks. For Chrissake, be proud of yourselves. Stop making excuses for enjoying a good comic book, obsessing over an old video game, loving an obscure movie. We’re not in middle school anymore; nobody’s stuffing you into your locker. Puff out your chest and declare that you are an utter poindexter. Geek ≠ meek.
Sermon over. Now here’s something to do when you’re not sneaking into a second showing of The Dark Knight.
Geek Out
Albert Areizaga’s Coney Island from the Saucer is one of the crowdsourced selections at the Brooklyn Museum’s “Click!” exhibit.
Click. The ©MURAKAMI exhibit ended its run at the Brooklyn Museum last week, and the place still has plenty to offer. For the next few weeks, you can see “Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition,” a juried exhibition in which the “jury” was visitors to the Brooklyn Museum website. After an open call for photography submissions, the web audience selected their favorites. The top-ranked photos made it into the show. It’s curation by the Digg model. Are the crowds as wise as they think? You can find out until August 10.
Hope. The hacker conference The Last HOPE is at the Hotel Pennsylvania through Sunday. I previewed the event in June.
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Fantasize. I’ve mentioned before that I like to savor the classics to a fault. It took me a decade to make it all the way through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and the pattern holds true for games, too: I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XII. Odd, I know. My fear is that I’ll finish up the game too quickly and miss something. (I don’t use strategy guides or walkthroughs on the first playthrough, so I always end up missing a few things, anyway, but I strive for perfection nonetheless.) I did pick up FF12 again this week and got sucked in again. I might even go ahead and finish it now. Probably not, though.
Aside from drawing my playtime out to a ridiculous degree, the other part of my “savoring” compulsion is that once I do finally finish a Final Fantasy game, I put it away and let my memories fade. That way, I can come back to it “fresh” someday. For years I horded all my old consoles to this end, but then Square Enix realized they could make money off their library, so for much of the decade they’ve been re-releasing the “classic” (i.e., old) Final Fantasy games to new consoles. (The latest of these is Final Fantasy IV for the DS, which hits stores on Tuesday, but FF4 Advance for the Game Boy Advance is practically the same game and a cheaper buy.) You don’t need to dig out your dusty, glitchy NES console anymore to play the oldest FFs.
The re-releases are fine, but jeez, those random battles can be a long slog. If you’re short on time, I recommend Googling for a ROM and playing with an emulator. (That’s not terribly legal, of course, so I’m only “kidding.”) You can speed up the playback speed during those long stretches of grinding to make level-raising more practical and less soul-sucking. However you choose to play, maybe this is the weekend when your memory has faded enough to finally fantasize all over again.
P.S.: The obligatory favorites list: FF6, FF8, FF10, FF12.
Selected search terms that brought visitors to Geek Out New York last week:
- are people like a crossword puzzle interview
- but this didn’t succeed as we planned
- “dave morin”1
- stupid bid on price is right
- making plugs for m 80s
- blowup skee ball
- hardcore leggins photo
- cloud
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This one baffled me until I conducted the search and realized that Dave Morin was one of the “friends” I made fun of in last week’s iPhonepalooza II post. Turns out he’s a real guy, a junior executive at Facebook. I tried to reach him to apologize, but he was on the phone with Stockholm. ↑
“A journey round the world. A look back in time, and a window on the future. A treasure house of religious faiths. A procession of products. And a dream of ‘Peace through Understanding.’”1
Geek Out
It’s the World’s Fair! I’d imagine the bulk of my readers never got a chance—due to lack of funds, lack of time, or lack of existence—to attend the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. We all know the Unisphere, perhaps from Men in Black or from the knockoff at Trump International Hotel in Columbus Circle, but that’s the extent of popular familiarity with the ‘64 Fair. You can remedy that this Sunday at the LaGuardia Holiday Inn, where a 1964-65 World’s Fair Show and Sale is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The fest will supposedly include book signings, memorabilia, and even era-appropriate refreshments. I say “supposedly” because information on the event is sketchy. The only pre-event press I can find is a post on the AM New York Urbanite blog, but AMNY people are trustworthy folk, so I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
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Manhattanhenge Redux. I promised you Manhattanhenge would return, didn’t I? Head to the east side of the city tonight or tomorrow a little before 8 p.m. to watch the sun set in alignment with the city grid. If you want to study up on the ‘Henger scene, reread my profile of the first Manhattanhenge ‘08 from June. It’s the article so nice you can enjoy it twice!
Geek In
Be civilized. There’s few better ways to pass an unexpectedly humdrum weekend evening than a Civilization game. This week brought the latest release in the sprawling Civ franchise, Civilization Revolution. It’s the first game in Sid Meier’s classic turn-based strategy series made for home consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, and DS) rather than the PC. Civ’s complexity and necessarily ornate interface have always made it ill-suited to console play, and those same qualities made it a hard sell to the vaunted “casual gamer.” Civ Revolution supposedly scales back the detail a touch to make the game more accessible, and while I haven’t tried it yet, it appears to be getting good notices in the gaming press. If you’ve never played Civ before, try out Revolution and let me know how it goes. Beware: It could be the perfect gateway drug.
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That was the lead written by National Geographic journalist Carolyn Bennett Patterson in this crazy old World's Fair photo spread dug up by Modern Mechanix. ↑
It’s a day that should have been here a lot sooner, but now that it’s here, everyone’s too happy to care. It’s the launch of the iPhone Apps Store. Now we can install third-party applications on our iPhones! As if we haven’t been doing that all along!
Well, most of us have, anyway, through the magic of jailbreaking. Confession time: Not me. Though it may seem unbecoming a self-billed geek, I never jailbroke my iPhone. None of the “underground” apps appealed to me enough to take the plunge, and so my naive iPhone prattled on, running its default set of apps and nothing else. Today, as novices and hackers alike dive into the third-party pool together, I can come clean with my shameful secret. It feels good.1
But in this new, Apple-sanctioned world, are the apps that much more desirable? I’ve been stumbling around the aisles in the App Store all day to find out.
My first download was the Facebook app. It doesn’t stray much from the iPhone interface Facebook has offered on the web for months now, but it feels snappier, at least. I like it, but your mileage may vary. It helps if you have better friends than the ones in the Apple screenshot.
Joe Hewitt: is boring. And lonely. Those two things are not unrelated.
Scott Marlette: isn’t satisfied to post that he’s listening to music; he needs you to know that it is punk music.
Laura Copeland: Somebody needs to have kids already.
Dave Morin: is more important than you.
MySpace is also on the iPhone, keeping true to their brand with an app that is more annoying and looks crappier than Facebook’s.
Many of the marquee apps out today are games, chief among them Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, a very cool Marble Madness-esque game that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer in very clever fashion. You tilt the phone to roll the monkey’s orb around the course or, in my case, send that freaking monkey to his fiery doom over and over again. There’s a bit of a learning curve.
Another challenging game is puzzler Enigmo, although the biggest challenge here is resisting the temptation to grind your iPhone into a fine paste after a few minutes of playing. Enigmo was originally designed for Mac OS X, where the mouse allows you a high degree of precision. The iPhone is somewhat less precise, and while the game is still fun, it’s tough to make it through a level without a few dozen misplaced taps screwing up your progress. That gets frustrating. The decision to make a double-tap serve as “pause” struck me as especially misguided somewhere around the billionth time I triggered it by accident.
Joking aside, I think this is going to be the No. 1 problem with many PC-to-iPhone game ports.
No portable platform is complete without a Texas Hold’em game, so Apple programmed their own to ensure that the niche would be filled. In the iTunes listing page, Apple sweetens the deal with this lady in an (alluringly?) half-upturned cowgirl hat. The description boasts of the game’s “realistic opponents.” Having played a fair amount of hold’em in a real-life casino, I beg to differ. If they wanted to be realistic, the pretty lady would be nursing an hours-old chicken caesar wrap and she would insist every 30 seconds or so that “Keno, there’s the real money game!” Also, the pretty lady would be a retired snowmobile salesman in a Members Only windbreaker.
Not a Hold ’Em player? Perhaps you’d prefer Karen Weems’ Hold On! The object of this game is—well, see if you can guess from this screenshot.
Rather than bill this app as a “game,” which it is in the barest sense of the word, Weems instead registered Hold On! in the Productivity category, justifying that odd classification with this promo copy: “Develop your perseverance and improve your concentration skills to make you more productive!”
Do our schools have an adequate holding-buttons-down curriculum? Are we failing the next generation of workers?
Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Hold On!—what more can I expect for free? You have to pay for the higher class of apps, like Shout It, which asks $4 to transform your iPhone into a space-age device capable of saying
Name one scenario in which using Shout It won’t make you look like an enormous tool. (I do give the developers credit, however, for alerting people to the more sensible, free alternative to “Shout It” right there in its title.)
I don’t have a problem with simplicity, though. My favorite app of all is called Light. When it opens, the iPhone screen turns white so that you can use it as a flashlight. No joke, I use my iPhone for this all the time. Just try that with your Nokia! Wait, no, don’t. It’ll work.
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The nadir of my secret, un-jailbroken period came while I was watching a recent episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. In the limo on the way to an awards show, Griffin beau Steve Wozniak scoffed at her virgin iPhone in disbelief—“You haven’t hacked your iPhone?!”—and immediately jailbroke it for her. I felt Woz’s scowl through the TV screen and knew that he was disappointed in me, personally. ↑
GONY’s signing off early for the weekend to celebrate the anniversary of an old document being sent off to the printer. I imagine your weekend is already full of plans—eating fried dough, setting off M80s, seeing what happens if you set off M80s in a mound of fried dough, heading to the emergency room for severe fried-dough burns, and so on. Enjoy it with my best wishes.
Of course, every holiday weekend has its lulls, so I’m cleaning out the old Geek Out New York bookmarks bin to ensure you’re not without some timekillers in between hot-dog-eating contests this weekend. In other words, the following links normally wouldn’t be good enough for the main page, but they’ll do just fine when I’m trying to get the hell outta Dodge for the Fourth. Enjoy!
Take care of the 4oJ obligatories. Check the schedule for Friday’s fireworks show and find a good viewing perch if you’re in the city (and if you’re not, rest assured that NBC will be airing a live Salute to Fireworks from New York). Damien Franco has a nice tipsheet up to help you take some decent fireworks photos instead of the blurry crap you throw up on your Flickr page every year.
Track birds. OK, technically, they’re satellites, but I learned from my satellite TV message boards that if you want to sound cool, you call them “birds.” It’s true. Watch the following sentence just ooze coolness: At n2yo.com you can track the flight path of countless birds, including military birds, TV birds, weather birds, and other bird varieties. How many top-secret spy satellites (i.e., spy birds) are over your head right now? More than you think.
Make a marble adding machine. Clack, clack, clack! That’s the sound of math!
Feel tiny. You think that picture’s intimidating? In the last image of the Size of Our World series, the Sun barely registers as a single pixel. Warning: This page kinda makes your local fireworks “spectacular” seem a little less so.
Cheese. Nothing, however, can dampen the spectacle of “Major Boobage“—not even a behind-the-scenes look from South Park Studios at the 3-D modeling and rotoscoping of said boobage.
Sound smart. Ever wonder where I get some of those marvelous quotes that appear at the beginning of each “Do Something This Weekend” post? No? You don’t even read this site? You accidentally typed in the address when you meant to visit “Geek Out Newark”? Fine. I don’t think you really deserve this link, but let’s move on.
Launch hedgehogs. Jason Kottke got me hooked on the Flash game Hedgehog Launch, and I will not forgive him until I match his record of achieving hedgehog space orbit in just 4 days.
Typecast yourself. Lean back from that gibberish text above, courtesy of ASCII-o-matic, and you can almost see me wishing you a happy Fourth.
All contents copyright © 2007-2008 John Teti.
