You can buy an ad blocking service, but you have to pay in sand dollars...
You think movie ticket prices are too high for you? Think about needing to buy 5 extra pairs of 3D glasses...
How come this problem never happens in sci fi movies? Seriously, I have never yet seen anyone have to deal with this. You have the earth rotation, the earth's orbit around the sun, the sun's orbit through the Milky Way, and the universe's general rate of expansion. I really don't think Doc Brown's DeLorean accounted for all of that stuff.
I can deal with having a song stuck in my head. It's annoying, but whatever, it happens all the time.
I can even deal with having my own song stuck in my head. It's more annoying, but it's an occupational hazard for being a composer. I talked about it in Chapter 10 of Orchestra of One... I can totally deal with it.
But the song stuck in my head right now? It's the worst.
I've been composing a song for the last few days, and have been making revisions and changes to it. And it's an old version of the song that's stuck in my head. A version that NO ONE ELSE WILL EVER HEAR.
AAAAAAAAAARGH.
As much as I do other things, I'm fully aware that most of the people that visit this site do so because of my connections to Club Penguin. As a little Christmas gift to you this year, I've made a special puzzle. Can you solve it?
Have you heard the phrase "put on your thinking cap"?
The first time I heard it was when I was in kindergarten. The teacher was trying to get us all to think hard about something, and so she said "Put your thinking caps on!" in that cheery way that is known only to those who regularly try to educate children under the age of 6. What she meant was something like this:
A thinking cap, it seems, is an imaginary device that allows you to help focus your mind on things and concentrate. My assumption is that all of the other students understood it in this way as well.
Not me. The first time I heard that phrase, I envisioned holding two bottle caps to my ears to hold in all of my thoughts.
The problem, I think, is that the teacher said "Put on your thinking caps". She pluralized "cap". Makes sense if you're talking to a room full of children, but being an only child and an introvert, did I think about the other children in the room? No! I was trying to wrestle with the absurdity of putting two hats on my head – who would do such a crazy thing? – and decided that holding imaginary bottle caps to my ears was far more logical.
I got pretty good grades in school, though. So... thanks, bottle caps?
I have made my living in the video game industry for over 10 years now. In many ways, it's been a wonderful job, and I've progressed in ways that I didn't expect. I've done art, level design, programming, music composing, and have been exposed to a large number of areas in the game industry and beyond. I am thankful for that. However, choosing to turn my hobbies into my job has come at a price.
I don't make art just for me any more.
When I create something, it's for someone else. Usually, it's for work, sometimes it's for friends or close family, but it's almost never just for me. I get paid for my work, either with money, attention, or words of praise. Whenever I create something, it goes through this filter of "would anyone else like it?"
I hate that.
I used to do things just for me. I used to doodle on homework, not caring if anyone would see it. I would compose songs that no one would hear. I would bring ideas to life and then hide them away. And then there was the big one...
Teenagers was my comic strip. I started it the day I turned 13, and stopped when I was 16. I tried to make it daily, and while I fell short of that goal, by the time I decided to stop making them, I had over 700 comics.
700 of these things. Granted, most of them weren't funny, and the writing was less than stellar, but a great deal of my childhood was in these.
The thing is, I can count on one hand the number of people who have read them all. A few of the better comics were in a high school art show, and some of the punchlines ended up getting repurposed for Club Penguin's comics page, but generally I kept them to myself.
I didn't do it for them. I didn't do it for you. I did it for me. And it was good.
Maybe I should blame it on the fact that I turned my hobby into a job. When I started doing art all day as my actual work, coming home and doing more of that didn't have the thrill it used to. Maybe I should blame it on our culture – so obsessed with social networking and being dependent on others for validation. Am I still good enough at this? Let's ask the 7000 Twitter followers!
I don't know. I don't regret my career decision, but I also know that if I'd chosen a completely different direction and kept art as my hobby, I'd have kept a joy in it that I seem to have lost.
Oddly enough, this is one of the things for which I love Super Mario Maker. I've made levels that no one might ever see, and I've enjoyed it. And that proves to me that the spark isn't completely lost at all.
On Sep. 11, Super Mario Maker released. It's a product that is a perfect justification for the Wii U's existence, but more than that, it's an ultimate creative tool for video game makers. I've been loving it, and I'm posting my first 3 levels here. If you own Super Mario Maker, I'd love it if you checked them out:
1. Fill in the Blank
Level Code: 0D15-0000-004E-21D2
My easiest so far (at least of the level's I've released). However, it's not as easy as it first appears.
2. Bowser Reef
Level Code: 9CE0-0000-0032-79C9
This started from asking myself the simple question "What if there were underwater Thwomps?".
3. The Fish Fryer
464E-0000-0034-DD76
According to the ratings as of this blog post, it's the least-liked level out of the three, but it's my favorite. Using the lava levels, I gave myself a restriction of using just a few enemy types, focusing on the Cheep Cheeps (the fish). The result is downright stressful.
Hello! It’s time for Fact Friday with Screenhog. I am Screenhog, and today we’re talking about our speedy Earth.
It’s probably not something you think about much, but you are constantly in motion because the Earth is moving all the time. Our planet Earth is always in motion in a few different ways. First, there’s the rotation of the earth around its axis once every 24 hours; we, of course, call this a “day”. Secondly, there’s the Earth’s revolution around the sun every 365 ¼ days, which we call a “year”. But there’s also a third one; the “galactic year”. This is the time it takes for our whole solar system -- sun, planets, and all -- to revolve around the Milky Way galaxy. This takes somewhere between 225 and 250 million of our years.
With all this in mind, how fast does the earth really move? Well, it’s the galactic year that really answers this question for us. Because of how fast we rotate around the Milky Way, if you compare the Earth’s position to a fixed point in the universe, this planet is travelling around 220 km/sec (around 140 mi/sec). This is about 500 times faster than the speed of the average bullet. This means that every single day of your life you have been travelling at superspeed. (Granted, our solar system is doing most of the work, and everyone else is doing this too, but hey, it’s still gotta count for something, right?)
This has been Fact Friday. Screenhog out.
In honor of Nintendo's 30th anniversary and the release of Super Mario Maker, here's an older Fact Friday that you might enjoy:
Hello! It’s time for Fact Friday with Screenhog. I am Screenhog, and today we’re talking about Popeye... the video game.
In 1981, the video game company Nintendo was just starting to make arcade games, and wanted to make a game that would be just as successful as Pac-Man. How? Up-and-coming game designer Shigeru Miyamoto had a plan. He wanted to use Popeye (you know, the animated sailor who would acquire super-strength every time he ate spinach). He wanted to license Popeye, Olive Oyl (his girlfriend), and Bluto (his main rival) for an arcade game.
Nintendo started to make the game, with the story that Bluto had captured Olive Oyl, and it was up to Popeye to save her. Bluto wasn’t going to make it easy, though… Bluto hurled barrels and other obstacles down at Popeye, trying to get him. It was a great game idea, but the deal fell through… the rights holders for Popeye refused to let Nintendo use the characters.
Rather than stop there, Nintendo decided to switch out the Popeye characters for their own. Bluto turned into Donkey Kong, a big ape who had captured a girl named Pauline. Popeye turned into a jumping mustached man named Jumpman. Donkey Kong was released, and the game was a huge hit.
Jumpman, of course, didn’t keep his name for long. When Donkey Kong was released, Nintendo had just acquired an office in North America to handle translation and distribution of the game. The name of the landlord of that office was… Mario.
This has been Fact Friday. Screenhog out.
As part of the ongoing effort to make this website more awesome, I've added the complete released soundtrack for Mech Mice Tactics to the Music section. Enjoy!
(As a side note, there were songs I composed for Mech Mice Tactics that never got to be part of the finished game... I hope I can present those some day.)
Did you ever grow up with "Opposite Day"? It usually happened at school – someone would do something normally out of character or say something obviously wrong, and then exclaim "It's Opposite Day!". This would then create a flurry of conversation where everyone would say or do as many opposite things as possible.
Well, I just realized something. You can't truthfully say "It's Opposite Day" on Opposite Day. If it is Opposite Day, the correct statement would be "It's not Opposite Day", because you're trying to say the opposite thing, but if it's not Opposite Day, the correct statement would ALSO be "It's not Opposite Day", because of course it's not actually that day, and why would you say that? This creates an obvious problem in trying to communicate whether it actually is or isn't Opposite Day, one which can only be solved by proclaiming a future day to be Opposite Day: "It's going to be Opposite Day tomorrow!", for instance. Either that, or when it actually is Opposite Day, you create some kind of code phrase so that everyone...
You know, these kinds of thoughts probably go a long way toward explaining why I was a loner in school...
Hello! It’s time for Fact Friday with Screenhog. I am Screenhog, and today we’re talking about deadly tomatoes.
Did you know that tomatoes are poisonous? Well, they’re not, but if you were part of Europe in the 1700’s, that little tidbit of information was common knowledge. The tomatoes of that time were making everybody sick. Even in Italy, where today the tomato is an integral part of fine cuisine, 300 years ago it was strictly avoided by food-lovers.
What was going on? Well, science at the time was obviously far behind what we know now, but 18th century botanists were no fools. When people started getting sick from eating tomatoes, the likely culprit seemed to be the fact that tomatoes were related to the deadly nightshade plant, whose berries and foliage were toxic to humans. (In fact, many relatives of the nightshade plant, including tomatoes, do have stems and leaves that can make you sick.) But the reality was far less sinister.
In the 1700’s, Europeans used pewter to make their plates, which was a metal alloy that contained mostly tin, but also small amounts of lead. When tomatoes made it to people’s plates, the acid from the tomato would eat into the plate slightly, absorbing some of the lead. While the tomato itself was harmless, the method of serving it was giving people lead poisoning, giving rise to the myth of the deadly tomato.
This has been Fact Friday. Screenhog out.
Welcome to the new face of Screenhog.com. The subsequent redesign. The next generation.
Why has Screenhog.com changed?
Screenhog.com was running all right, but in the last few years, things have changed:
- I started using Twitter. Twitter is awesome. Not everyone thinks so, but for me, it's great! I can post up a random picture, say a random thing, and get instant feedback. Plus, people who know me from my days at Club Penguin, my current job at Hyper Hippo, or wherever else they happen to know me can just say hi! I like it! Unfortunately, it's meant that I started to look at Screenhog.com as a place to only put up important things. "Important" meaning big, monumental projects, or long, complex thoughts. And as I hadn't been as interested in posting those on the Internet, the blog suffered.
- Screenhog.com was a blog. Blogs, by nature, are constant streams of content. But sometimes I wanted to put up a picture or a piece of music and have it stay up for a while in its own dedicated space. The Wordpress blog didn't seem as friendly for that sort of thing.
- I'm horrible at editing websites. I come from a time when editing a website meant knowing HTML. There was no CSS. There was no browsing on mobile devices. Flash was a warmly welcomed part of the Internet and a main source of interactive entertainment. But times have changed. I wanted a website that I knew how to edit, but that browsers everywhere can actually experience cleanly.
So, I'm trying this Squarespace thing. Will it work? I don't know. But I think I'll feel more free to edit and update it, and that's good.
Seriously, though, if you really want to hear from me more often, you should be following me on Twitter. You'll hear from me more often. I'm also generally funnier there.